EZRig^™

Ten minutes of reading that will save an hour at a soundcheck.

What this app is

EZRig plays a band's backing tracks and, at the same time, the things that must stay with them: video on a screen behind you, MIDI to whatever else is on stage, and lighting. It runs from an iPad at the kit, and it is built so that the person operating it is usually also playing.

Free to try, then one purchase

EZRig is free for 28 days from the day you download it, and everything works in that time. After that, playing a show is the part that needs the full version - one purchase, no subscription, GBP 29.99 in the UK and Apple's own equivalent elsewhere, tied to your Apple Account and so covering every iPad and iPhone you sign in to.

What stops at the end of the trial is short: pressing Play, playing a song to tap a chart through, and capturing DMX, all three being a show playing with a different screen in front of you. Nothing else changes. Every song, set, alignment, mix, chart and backup stays exactly where it is, importing and editing carry on as before, and the Sync Check still plays, because setting a rig up is not performing.

The Full version row is the last thing in Settings, in a group of its own, because it is a fact about the app rather than a job to do to the rig. It says how many days are left, or Bought. Restore a purchase sits on that row as well as on the buy screen, for anyone who has paid already and is setting a new iPad up - looking for it should not mean reading a sales screen first.

One clock

Everything runs from the audio clock. Video, MIDI and lighting all read that clock; none of them can push it. This is the single most important thing about the app, and it is why a set that drifts on other rigs stays locked on this one. When you align a video or a lighting capture later in this manual, you are moving that thing against the clock — never moving the clock.

Two modes, kept apart

Build is where you prepare: import songs, name tracks, set levels, build the running order, set the rig up. It is four doors - Songs, Mixer, Sets and Settings - and each one carries a line saying what is behind it, so how many songs are on the iPad or whether the rig wants a look is readable without going in. Showtime is the performance screen: fixed layout, big targets, nothing that rearranges itself. You reach Showtime through one door at the foot of the sidebar, and you leave it through one control in its own top corner, with a confirmation, so it cannot happen by accident.

What you need

The order things happen in

1. Plug the interface in and power it before launching the app, so the outputs are there to be found.
2. Attach the screen if you are using one, before the show rather than between songs.
3. Open the app. It prepares in the background; the Showtime door says READY when it is done.
4. Load the set you are playing. With no set loaded the show plays the library in name order.
5. Open the Line Check and walk it. It checks the set, the rig and every bus, and says what will bite before the doors open rather than after. Chapter six covers it.
6. Check the status icons on Showtime: audio, screen, MIDI, lights and DMX.
7. Play the first song from the Play bar or the footswitch.

What to plug in, in what order, and why each piece is there.

The smallest rig that works

An iPad and a pair of headphones. Every song plays, video appears on the tablet itself, and nothing else is needed. Useful for building a set on a train; not what you take to a gig.

The band rig

Adding lighting

Lighting arrives over the network as Art-Net. Two directions matter, and they are separate jobs: capturing a song's lighting from a rig that already exists, and sending a captured song back out to a node. Chapter ten covers both.

The order to plug things in

1. Interface, powered, into the hub. Then the hub into the iPad.
2. Screen. If it arrives late the app copes, but video readiness only settles once it is there.
3. MIDI, whether by DIN from the interface or by joining a network session on the Mac.
4. Network adapter, if you are running lights.
5. Open the app last. It reads what is attached as it prepares.

Fixed addresses, once

If you run a wire for lighting, give both ends a fixed address rather than letting them pick their own: the lighting Mac's adapter 192.168.10.1, the iPad 192.168.10.2, mask 255.255.255.0, no router. Then nothing has to be re-pointed between gigs.

A song is a folder of tracks, not a stereo file with things bolted on.

What the app expects

Up to sixteen audio tracks, optional MIDI, optional video, optional lighting. Every track gets its own fader, its own output and its own name. A stereo file becomes two tracks, because two sides were always two faders.

Four ways in, on one screen

New Song does not open an empty song any more. It opens the question that comes first - what are you here to do - as four tiles: build one by hand, bulk import a folder, and the two Dropbox tiles that share a library with the rest of the band (chapter seventeen's File sharing). Building one by hand is only one of the ways to add material, and the others used to be scattered across an overflow menu and a Settings pane.

There are always four, whatever this iPad has set up. A tile that cannot work yet is greyed and says why on its own second line rather than swallowing a tap - and somebody who has never shared a show can see where that ends up before it is reachable.

Importing a folder of exports

Before the folder picker opens there is one more screen, and it is there because the picker on its own has no idea what it is being asked for. It sets a one-off import beside a shared show - the same folder of songs, kept in step on every iPad in the band, which is the more advanced version of the same job - as two tiles rather than a stack, because the question is which of the two you want rather than which comes first. It can be turned off once you have read it.

1. Songs → New Song → BULK IMPORT, or Import Songs... from the overflow. Pick the folder your exports live in.
2. The grid opens: one row per song, one column per track position.
3. Name the tracks. Names travel with the track, so replacing a file later keeps the name.
4. Set each track's output. Click to one, backing to another, stems wherever you want them.
5. To move a track along its row, hold it until the fill sweeps across it (half a second), then drag. A quick drag anywhere, on a track or not, scrolls the grid. Carry a track to the left or right edge and the grid scrolls under it, faster the closer you go to the edge.
6. Save. Each row is written as it finishes, so a long import can be watched rather than waited on. Once every song is saved the top-left button says Done; while songs are still waiting it says Cancel and asks before forgetting them.

There is a short, silent walkthrough on the import screen itself, showing the whole thing happening: picking the folders, what the grid does with them, and pressing Save. It loops, and it is there because the first import is the one moment where a picture beats a paragraph.

The song editor

Tap a song's row in the library to open it; the play button on the right of the row arms and plays it instead. Each section is covered below.

Charts and score parts

Further down the editor, CHART AND SCORES holds the song's lyric-and-chord chart and any PDF score parts, for band members' own phones and tablets. They never appear on Showtime. Chapter thirteen covers them.

Folders

The Songs screen groups into collapsible folders, and a heading is always drawn with its count. New folder in the header makes one; a half-second hold on a heading renames or deletes it, and deleting a folder never deletes a song — they become ungrouped. In Bulk Edit, Move to folder… files a whole selection at once, and the sheet's first row makes a new folder and files them into it in the same step.

None of this moves anything on disk. A song is still named by its own folder under Documents, so sets, the running order and every command that names a song are untouched by filing one. A folder is a way of looking at the library, not a place a song lives.

The set editor's song picker gets the same folders as a filter, so building a set from one band's material does not mean scrolling past another's.

Deleting a song

Swipe a song's row to the left in the library and tap Delete. It always asks first: Delete this song? Everything in its folder goes, and any set that names it shows it as missing. Keep it backs out. Deleting is refused while the show plays.

Press and hold a song for more

Hold a song's row in the library for half a second and a menu opens beside it: Edit this song, Align to audio, Add to a set, Delete this song. Everything in that menu is also reachable the ordinary way - it is a shortcut, never the only route to anything. While you hold, the row fills with colour so you can see the hold registering; let go early and the fill retreats rather than opening anything. Align to audio opens the song's alignment window (chapter nine); if the show is playing it asks to stop the show first.

An entry you cannot use right now sits in the menu dimmed, with the reason underneath, rather than failing silently - Delete this song, for instance, while the show is playing. The same gesture and the same rule - stated reasons, never a dead control - turns up again in the next two chapters and in the mixer.

The running order, and what happens in the gaps.

What happens between songs

This belongs to the set, not the song: the same recording waits for the singer in one set and runs straight in on another.

Beside a gap's stepper sits a row of one-tap presets: 0.5 s, 1 s, 2 s, 4 s, 6 s and 10 s. The one that matches the current gap is lit. Use the stepper for anything in between.

One row carries the song, how it starts and, for "run in after", the gap. The stepper moves in half seconds and a row of presets — 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 6 and 10 seconds — puts each one a single tap away. A song may appear twice, which is what an encore is.

Renaming and deleting a set

Rename sits in the set editor's header, and beside Edit and Load in Manage Sets' preview. It refuses an empty name, a name another set already has, and any rename while the show plays, and says which. Renaming the set that is loaded keeps it loaded.

Deleting a set, from its bin or its hold menu, always asks first: Delete this set? The running order goes; the songs stay on the iPad. The same goes for a backdrop's bin on the Backdrops screen.

Press and hold, here too

The same half-second hold from chapter three works on a song's row inside a running order - Edit this song, Remove from this set - and on a set's own row in Manage Sets - Load (or Unload), Edit this set, Delete this set. Nothing here is offered that a visible control could not already do; the hold just shortcuts to it.

Tracks belong to the song. Buses belong to the rig. Changing interface never means editing songs.

The idea

A track has a level into every bus. A bus says which physical output it leaves by, and how loud. Move the rig to another interface and you re-point the buses; every song is untouched.

The board shows one mix at a time. A rail of chips along the foot names the rig's buses, plus Masters for the bus faders themselves and Routing for every track against every bus at once. Pick a chip and every track strip is that track's level into that one mix. A track that is not in the mix you are looking at is still drawn, dimmed and reading -inf, because hiding it would be hiding the thing you came to change: bringing its fader up is what puts it in the mix, and taking it to silence is what takes it out. That is why there is no separate routing step any more.

Working the faders

• Drag the cap. A tap elsewhere does nothing — a screen at the kit gets knocked.
• Double-tap a cap to put it back to 0 dB.
• M on a track is kept with the song, the way its level is - a track muted on Tuesday is still muted on Friday. S, and both on a bus, are live only and never saved. Showtime shows "MUTE/SOLO ACTIVE · Clear" whenever any are on, so none can be left up by accident.
• The mixer has the same one-tap clear: Clear mute and solo appears in the column header whenever any mute or solo is on, and clears every one of them, tracks and buses.

A strip reads the same either side of the board: the dB readout at the top, the fader on its printed scale with a meter beside it, then M and S, then the coloured name plate at the foot. A track strip's plate says which mix this fader is setting and how many others the track is heard in; a bus strip's says which output it leaves by. Bus levels belong to the rig, so they are the same in every song. The strips take their colour from the bus whose mix you are in, which is a colour you pick in the mixer rather than one the app assigns.

Naming and routing

Tap a bus's name plate to rename it or send it somewhere else. The outputs it offers are the ones the connected interface can actually honour, so the label and the speaker can never disagree: on a box with a routing matrix that is every output it has, and on a plain two-output interface it is left, right or both, because that is all a bus can be given there. The targets are large, because this gets used at a soundcheck with a torch in your teeth.

Hold either name plate instead of tapping it, and a menu opens with a few more shortcuts: the same rename (or rename-and-reroute for a bus), plus Reset to 0 dB, Mute and Solo - the same half-second hold as chapter three's library rows, refusing whatever the show would refuse at the time, with the reason stated rather than a dead row.

Add bus declares another. A new bus has no output until you choose one, so it can never appear in the wrong speakers. Removing one is refused while a track still feeds it.

Feeding more than one bus

There is nothing to add or remove. A track is in a mix when its fader in that mix is above silence, so sending the click to a second set of in-ears is one chip and one fader, and taking it out again is pulling that fader down. There is no cap on how many mixes a track can be in, and no "main" one among them.

A track can also be sent nowhere at all: take its last fader to silence and the strip reads "Not sent". That is a routing choice saved with the song, not a mute - it is why a track turned off does not come back on at the next launch, and why nothing warns you about it.

The check that runs before the doors open, so the surprises happen while there is still time to do something about them.

The Line Check sits under the four doors, beneath a BEFORE THE SHOW heading, because it is the last thing you do rather than the first: it is the one screen that looks at the whole rig at once and tells you what is wrong in plain words. The Showtime door offers it once per session when something is red, and never gets in the way a second time. It was called Tonight until 2026-09-27, when Settings' own Tonight area was removed and one name doing two jobs became one.

The set

One row per song in the running order, saying what it carries and what it is missing. A song the set names that is not on this iPad is named here rather than discovered at the gap before it. Under a song's title it also says, without grading it, when that song sends a track somewhere this rig has no bus for — the track plays, through the front-of-house bus, and chapter five's mixer is where you would change it.

The rig

Interface, bus outputs, the audio engine, the armed song, screen, MIDI, lights, network, power, storage, your last backup, and - where one is set up - the shared show. Each line is graded: green is fine, amber is worth a look, red is something to fix. A line you can act on carries the way to fix it, and tapping it takes you to the setting rather than making you find it.

Two of them are worth knowing before you meet them. Check your buses appears when the rig declares a bus the audio graph has no mixer for, which happens when a song arriving after launch names one: its tracks play, at front of house, with their strips still naming the bus they asked for. It is red, and the fix is closing the app and opening it again - about five seconds, no network and nobody else. And the Shared show line says when this iPad is behind the band, which is never counted among the things to fix: the commonest place to be behind is a venue with no usable Wi-Fi, where taking the update is not something anybody can do.

The line check

A row per bus. Ping plays a tone down that bus alone for a couple of seconds; tap Heard it and it moves to the next. It is the fastest honest way to find out which speaker is which, and it is the only part of this screen that makes a noise. It stops on its own if the show starts.

A MIDI row after the buses sends the same test note Settings does. It is graded manually and never blocks anything, because a MIDI destination that is not answering is a normal state for a rig that does not use one.

Going on anyway

Nothing here stops you. Go on with problems? asks once and lists what is still red, and then takes you to Showtime. The check is advice from something that can see the whole rig at once, not a gate.

Under the Line Check row in the sidebar is when it was last looked at - "Checked 18 minutes ago", or, past six hours, a reminder that it no longer counts for tonight. Opening it by hand is free and changes nothing; loading a set or relaunching the app arms the door's one offer again. The switch that decides whether it is offered at all is in Settings, under Showtime screen.

One screen, fixed. Everything here is meant to be read at arm's length, mid-song.

The status bar

Left to right along the top: the battery, the loaded set, the time, any warning in plain words, then an icon each for audio, the screen, MIDI, lights and DMX, and finally Settings, Debug and the way out. An icon is green when the thing it names is working, amber when it wants a look, and unlit when there is nothing to say - a rig with no screen is a valid rig, so colour on this bar always means do something.

The now-playing card

Status, the song, the timers, and underneath the title what comes next and how it starts. Tapping the title opens that song's mixer; holding it opens a menu with the song editor, the alignment window and the chart.

The setlist

Each song is its own row with its own edge, so what you can press is obvious in the dark. Tap one to cue it — never to start it. READY marks what Play will start. A song the set runs into carries an amber arrow turning down into the next bar, and the word AUTO beside it; a song that waits for you carries nothing at all, which is what makes the mark readable from the kit - two grey words have to be told apart first, and a mark on some rows does not. The list scrolls itself as the show moves on, and stops fighting you if you have scrolled it by hand.

Cueing, and playing now

Hold the video pane for half a second, when the armed song has video or DMX, and Showtime opens that song's alignment window (chapter nine), with its locator where the show is standing. If the show is playing it asks first: Stop the show and align this song? There are only two answers, Cancel and Stop and align. There is no "keep playing" choice here, because the window plays the song itself and can never run at the same time as the show.

The curfew

The banner shows the curfew, how long until it, what the rest of the set still needs, and your slack — the number that says a song is about to be cut before it is cut.

Tap the banner to change it. A venue that moves the curfew mid-show does not require leaving Showtime: the banner opens a time wheel with Cancel and Save, and Save recalculates everything without touching playback.

Leaving

Leaving Showtime no longer has to stop the show. Exit Showtime, in the status bar's top corner, always asks first and offers three ways forward:

The two active choices deliberately lead with different words - "Leave" against "Stop" - rather than sharing one, so which choice keeps the music going reads from the word alone, at a glance, in the dark.

Solo Showtime

A second Showtime, for one performer on one iPad rather than a band with a drummer operating. Switch to it in Settings → Showtime screen; the door opens whichever you chose.

It is chart-led: the song's words and chords fill the screen, scrolling themselves if the chart has been timed, with the current line held a third of the way down. Underneath are the next song and the transport, and that is the whole screen — no faders, no video pane, no waveform, no Settings and no Debug. A drawer over the chart holds the running order; tapping a song cues it and never plays it, exactly as the band screen's setlist does.

It is the one screen built with pedals in mind first, since a solo performer's hands are on an instrument: the same pedal keys work here as everywhere, and the Play bar is sized to be found with a foot rather than a glance.

Its status strip reads the same icons as the band screen's, and for the same reason: it is the same operator on the same night, and two vocabularies for one fact is one more thing to learn at a quarter to eight. It had no battery at all until 2026-11-02 and has one now - on an iPad its own, inside the glyph, and on a phone iOS's, a few points above.

The Debug button's hold

Debug, beside Exit Showtime, opens on a two-second hold when no passphrase is set - a stray tap does nothing, and the button fills with colour as you hold so you can see it building rather than wondering whether you pressed it right; let go early and the fill retreats instead of opening anything. Set a passphrase (chapter eighteen's TROUBLESHOOTING card) and a plain tap opens a password prompt instead.

The buses pane

The rig's outputs with live meters, M and S, each strip carrying its name in colour at the top so what you are holding reads from across a stage. Whole strips only — it scrolls rather than resting on half a fader. Tapping the BUSES label at its foot opens the same strips large, over the rest of the screen; it never touches the transport.

On the same clock as the audio, with the screen's own delay accounted for.

Getting a picture

1. Attach the screen before the show. The app keeps a surface open so a song starts instantly.
2. Check DISPLAY is green on Showtime. Amber says no screen is attached, or video output is off in Settings.
3. A song with no video of its own shows the backdrop — a still or a loop, set for the rig and optionally per set.

Fades

Set the rig's own fade in Settings, override it per set, and override that per song - separately for the way a song's video arrives and the way it leaves. A song with no video reveals the backdrop rather than dipping through black.

A fade happens at both kinds of boundary, and what differs is what is underneath. A song the set waits before fades out to the backdrop and the next one fades in from it; a song the set runs straight into fades out and in with no backdrop between them, because the two songs are one continuous thing to the audience. A song's two edges are asked about separately, so a set can run song two in from song one and then wait before song three, and that song hides the backdrop on the way in and reveals it on the way out.

Two different delays

There are two numbers that decide when a picture appears, and they fix two different problems. It is worth getting straight which is which.

The two add together. Get the screen latency right first, on the real screen, with the Sync Check. Only then shift a song that still looks wrong. If every song looks late by the same amount, the fix is screen latency, not every song.

Screen latency and the Sync Check

Open the row and it shows the latency in milliseconds, with its size in frames once a song with video has been armed. -10 ms, Zero and +10 ms change it, and a second row of whole-frame steps - -5 f to +5 f - appears once there is a frame rate to count in, because a screen's delay is judged by eye against a picture and a picture moves in frames. A bigger number drives the video further ahead of the audio, for a slower screen.

1. Stop the show. The Sync Check is refused while anything plays.
2. Tap Play Sync Check. It plays a flash and a click together through the real outputs and on the real screen, outside the running order.
3. Watch the audience's screen, not the iPad, and step the latency until each flash and click land together.
4. Tap Stop Sync Check. The new latency is saved then, and the song that was armed comes back where it was. It does not start playing.

When the armed song carries its own video shift, the card mentions it in one line, and says it is changed in that song's alignment window, not here.

One window per song. The audio stays still. You slide the video and the lighting until they sit right against it.

What it is for

A song's video or lighting sometimes arrives slightly early or late against its audio: a video exported with a few frames of black at the top, or lighting that came from another machine. The alignment window is where you fix that, once, for that song. The fix is saved in the song and used at every show. A capture made on this iPad with Capture DMX needs no alignment, because the iPad that started the song also heard the lights.

The song editor's own way in is the ALIGNMENT row, which since 2026-09-28 sits directly under VIDEO rather than near the foot of the form: it is one row for the whole song, reading "Line the video and the lights up against the song", and when it cannot open, the line underneath turns amber and says why.

Getting in

It opens on the Video lane if the song has video, otherwise on DMX. The song editor's button is refused, with the reason underneath, for a song that has not been saved yet, for a song whose files have changed since it was saved, and while the app is still preparing.

The lanes

Drag a clip right and it plays later; drag it left and it plays earlier. The selected lane's panel (beside the preview, or on a narrow screen a sheet opened from the lane's name) shows its shift in milliseconds and, for video, in frames. It says it plainly - "Picture shifted 40 ms later (1.0 frames at 25 fps)", or "plays unshifted" at zero. It never claims the picture is in time just because of the number.

What your fingers do

The zoom bar above the lanes has -, a slider, +, Whole song, and a readout of the finest grid line on show. A strip beside it says in plain words what your finger is doing right now.

Nudging

For exact steps, the lane's panel has -1 fr, -10 ms, +10 ms and +1 fr (one frame at the video's own rate; 1 ms steps instead when there is no video), and Reset to 0. The DMX lane also has Suggest: it looks for the lighting's sharp hits against the song's beat and proposes a shift, with how sure it is. If there is not enough to go on it says so and changes nothing. A suggestion is one undoable step, like any other edit.

Video has no Suggest, on purpose. A music-video edit rarely cuts on the beat, so a beat matcher would confidently line up the wrong thing. Video is lined up by hand, by watching the singer's mouth against the vocal.

Instead, the Video lane shows Lip sync to vocal track, tagged Soon. It is a placeholder. Tap it and it explains what it will do one day - find the singer's mouth in the picture, line it up against the song's own vocal track and suggest a shift for you to check - and changes nothing at all.

Markers

Markers are there to help your eyes, nothing else. Drop a target on the audio at a clear moment - a word, a hit - and a marker on the video or lighting at the matching moment, then drag the clip until they meet. When a marker sits on a target, both are drawn in green with a tick and the word "Aligned".

The MARKERS list shows every marker with its time. Tap a name to rename it; tap the cross to remove it. Marker at locator and Target on audio drop one where the locator is. Markers are saved with the song. If a video or lighting file is later replaced, its old markers are dropped, and the window says how many.

The preview

The preview plays the song itself - its audio through your outputs, at the song's own levels, and its picture in the window, with your unsaved shift already applied. The projector is left alone, and no lighting or MIDI is sent.

The corner readout says SHIFTED, UNSHIFTED or LINED UP (the last only when a marker actually sits on a target). If the audio output changes while the preview plays, it stops; press Play to carry on.

Undo, Save, Discard

Every finished drag, nudge, reset, suggestion or marker change is one step. Undo and Redo sit in the top bar, greyed out when there is nothing to undo or redo (Command-Z and Shift-Command-Z on a keyboard).

Save is greyed out while the show is playing, and when there is nothing new to save. Save from a window opened in the song editor and the editor picks up the same values, so its own Save or Cancel neither overwrites nor undoes them.

What starts the other machine, and how to prove it before the first song does.

Two ways out

• DIN from the interface. The choice for a show: no network, no jitter.
• A network session over Wi-Fi. Useful when the iPad's port is taken by something else — an Ethernet adapter, for instance.

Joining a network session

1. On the Mac: Audio MIDI Setup → Window → Show MIDI Studio → double-click Network.
2. Under My Sessions, add a session and tick it to enable.
3. In Directory, select the iPad and click Connect. It moves up into Participants.
4. Set Live routings to that session.
5. In your DAW, enable Track and Remote for that input.
6. On the iPad, choose that session as the destination and press Test.

DMX means anything on that wire — lamps, hazers, motors. The app records it, plays it back on the show's own clock, and sends it out.

Three jobs, kept apart

Before you capture

1. Get the iPad and the lighting machine onto the same network — a wire if you can, Wi-Fi if you must.
2. Point the lighting software at the iPad. Sending to its own machine (127.0.0.1) reaches nothing.
3. Open Test DMX Input from the song's DMX row. It lists every address the iPad has, and says what is arriving.

Chapter eleven walks the wired setup and Test DMX Input's own log in full, plus the two faults that look exactly like a broken network and are not.

Capturing

1. Stop the show. Capture is refused while anything plays, while the app is still preparing, and with no network.
2. Song editor → DMX → Capture DMX.
3. It arms and plays that song; your MIDI starts the rig exactly as it does in a show.
4. Watch the log and the small universe beside it. Channels light as they arrive.
5. Stop when you have what you need, or let the song finish.
6. Read the summary, use Sanity Check to see the activity under the waveform, then Save or Discard.

Watching it

Aligning lighting that came from elsewhere

Lighting imported from a file rather than captured here may sit a little early or late. Open the song's alignment window (chapter nine) - from Align to Audio in the song editor's ALIGNMENT section, or from the Universe panel - and work on the DMX lane: drag it, nudge it, or try Suggest. Drag right to make the lighting later. Nothing reaches the song until you tap Save.

The old lighting-only alignment view, and the live nudging of the lights from Showtime while a song played, are gone. A lighting shift is now changed only with the show stopped, in the window, and takes effect as soon as it is saved.

Sending it out

• The last look is held when you stop, at the end of a song and between songs.
• Nothing is sent at all until the first Play after launch. Set the node to hold on signal loss and a crash leaves the stage lit rather than dark.
• Send a test signal proves the chain at a soundcheck without starting a song: it replays a real song's lighting at the node for a few seconds - the armed song's if it has any, the exact frames a Play would send.
• Before buying a node, prove the output against a Mac running the recorder in listen mode. The rig notes give the exact steps.

The wired link that makes a capture reliable, and the two faults that look exactly like a broken network and are not.

What Capture DMX actually does

It plays the song on the iPad. The song's own MIDI triggers your lighting software, exactly as it will on the night, and the iPad records the Art-Net the rig sends back — aligned to the song's own clock as it arrives, because the same device that started the song also heard the answer. The result is saved as song-lighting.dmx in the song's own folder.

Wiring the two machines together

1. A USB-C Ethernet adapter on the lighting Mac, and one on the iPad. One cable straight between them.
2. Give both ends a fixed address rather than letting them negotiate one, so nothing needs re-pointing next time.
3. From the Mac, ping the iPad's address. A live wired link answers every time, at around a millisecond.

Measured on the rig. Wi-Fi is fine for the phone remote, which only polls once a second — it is not fine for lighting, and the gap above is why a wire is worth running.

Pointing the lighting software at the iPad

Send Art-Net to 192.168.10.255 — the wired link's own broadcast address — or straight to the iPad at 192.168.10.2.

The one thing that costs an evening: App Nap

A second symptom worth naming

Check the link before you commit to a take

Test DMX Input, reached from the song's DMX row, plays nothing and saves nothing. It exists purely to answer one question — is anything arriving, and from where.

A healthy link settles around 40–44 frames a second, with ART-NET and DATAGRAMS climbing together. A dead one is exactly that: no new lines, RATE stuck at 0. Each line names the address the frame arrived from, so wired traffic can be told apart from Wi-Fi at a glance. If DATAGRAMS keeps climbing while ART-NET stays flat, something is arriving on the port that is not Art-Net — worth chasing down before assuming the lighting rig itself is at fault.

Doing the capture

1. Wire up, point the lighting software at the iPad, and check the rate on Test DMX Input first. A take is only worth taking once the rate looks right.
2. Song editor → DMX → Capture DMX, then wait through Getting the rig's attention — the iPad announces itself for a moment before the song starts. Starting the song first, before that finishes, loses the opening seconds of lighting: nothing was listening for it yet.
3. Let the iPad trigger your lighting software itself, over MIDI, exactly as it will on the night — do not start it by hand.
4. Let the song run to its own end and stop cleanly, or stop it yourself once you have what you need.
5. Read the summary, use Sanity Check to see the recorded activity under the song's own waveform, then Save.

When a capture will not behave

The band sees the set on their own phones. Whoever holds the password can run the show, and the mix, from there too.

There are two of these, and it is worth knowing which you want. Remote mode is this same app on another device, driving the show running on the iPad: it finds the tablet by itself, so there is nothing to type. The web remote is a page the iPad serves, opened in any phone's browser — no app to install, so anyone in the band can use it. Both are served by the iPad and both work with no internet at all.

Remote mode

Under the Showtime door, on a phone and - since 2026-11-02 - on an iPad too. Nothing technical ever stopped the second one; the door simply sat inside the phone's own shell, and a spare iPad is exactly what a band already has at the other end of a stage. On a large screen the column is held to a readable width in the middle rather than stretched, so every control stays the size a thumb was given and the set can be read from across a room.

It lists the tablets it can see, each row saying which set that one has loaded, which is the fact worth knowing from across a room. A tablet is named as its owner named it - "Nicks iPad" rather than "Show Sequencer Remote" - and will not offer you the device you are standing on, which matters more than it sounds: a remote driving its own tablet would appear to work perfectly and would go unnoticed until a second device was expected and never turned up. Tap one and you get the now-playing card, the setlist and the Play bar, drawn the same way Showtime draws them — no video and no waveform, since the phone does not have the files and streaming them is the one thing here that could cost the show something.

It asks for the password at the first command that needs one, not at the door, and remembers it for that tablet. If the link drops it says so plainly, and says whether the show was playing when it went — that sentence is the most important one in the mode, so it is only ever shown when it is true. It locks itself after a minute untouched, because a phone in a pocket presses things.

The web remote

1. Turn Serve the phone remote on. The card shows an address.
2. Open that address in any phone's browser, on the same network. Nothing to install, and it works with no internet.
3. Watching needs no password: the setlist, what is armed, what is playing, time left.
4. Set a remote password to allow control - at least six characters. A phone types it once and remembers it.
5. Changing the password revokes every phone that knew the old one.

The remote can Play, Stop and cue a song, exactly as before. It now has a second screen too - a SHOW/MIXER switch at the top of the page - carrying the same faders, mute and solo as the iPad's own mixer, and the same bus-first board: a rail of chips picks the mix, and a fader sets that track's level into that one mix rather than everywhere at once. Touch a fader on a phone and the same fader moves on the iPad at once; watch the strip and you will see it happen, or catch it afterwards as a line in the Debug screen's system event log naming which control a remote last changed and when. It still cannot jump straight to another song while one is playing (Play Now), rename or reroute a bus, add or remove one, or change anything under Settings.

The remote password cannot be the same as the stand password (chapter fourteen). The stand address is a separate page for the rest of the band: it shows charts and score parts and can control nothing.

Band members' own phones and tablets can show the current song's lyric-and-chord chart, or their own page of the score. Read only. Nothing on a stand can touch the show.

Scores: the stand inside the app

A band member with EZRig on their own iPad or phone does not have to type an address at all. Scores sits under Remote on the door list: it finds the tablets serving stands, asks which instrument you are tonight, and then shows nothing but music.

The questions come in the order they are actually asked - which tablet, which part, then the page - and that order is what lets the last screen be bare. Everything needing a menu has already been answered by the time the music is up.

• The instrument list is every part anywhere in the set, not just in the armed song, so somebody arriving at a stand on a song their instrument sits out is still offered the part they will need in four songs' time. The chart sits at the top of the same list, because to the person holding the stand it is the same question.
• Three modes, chosen top right: Manual moves nothing by itself and is where a stand opens; Follow set changes the song with the running order and leaves the pages to you; Auto-scroll moves the music itself while the song plays. The names say what each one follows - the set picks the song, the song moves the music - so the two automatic ones cannot be read as each other.
• Auto-scroll draws the whole part as one continuous scroll with the music a third of the way down, and a hand scroll wins while you are touching it and for five seconds after. It is offered only where the part can say where its music is, and says why where it cannot. A timed chart has always scrolled itself and still does.
• The bar number you are on carries a soft mark, so somebody who looks up can find their place again. It moves once per system rather than with the beat - deliberately, because a mark that followed the beat would be a bouncing ball, and the music itself is never coloured or drawn over.
• Turn a page with a swipe - left and up go on, right and down go back, which is what a continuous scroll of stacked pages would have done. The chevrons either side of Page 1 of 6 turn it too, while the bars are up.
• Tap anywhere on the music to hide the top and bottom bars, and again to bring them back. While you are following a playing show they are hidden anyway and a tap shows them for a few seconds; the rest of the time a hide stays hidden, because reading ahead between songs is exactly when the bars are in the way.
• Pinch to zoom up to four times and drag to move about. A page fits whole by default, which is what a stand shows; an upright phone leaves about a third of the screen unused, and this is what that third is for.
• It controls nothing whatever. There is no play, stop or cue anywhere in it, and no route on the tablet that would take one.

Two addresses, two jobs

Hand the stand address round freely. It never asks for the Remote Control password, so giving it out never gives out the mixer.

Adding a chart and parts to a song

Open the song editor. The CHART AND SCORES section appears once the song has been saved at least once. Changes here are written straight into the song folder, not held for the editor's Save, and they are refused while the show plays.

• Chart. Import one ChordPro file (.cho, .chordpro, .chopro), plain-text lyrics (.txt) or an .lrc file. Replace and Remove sit beside it. A file that is not readable text, is empty, has no lyric lines, or is MusicXML is refused with a sentence saying which. ChordPro directives the app does not use are listed, not hidden.
• Score parts. Add a Score Part (PDF), then give it a part name - Keys, Trumpet 1, whatever the player will look for. Every page is prepared on the spot ("Rendering pages..."). A locked, unreadable or empty PDF, one over 40 pages, or a part name the song already has, is refused. Each part can be renamed or removed.

Charts and parts are part of the song folder, so a rig backup carries them. The prepared page images are left out of a backup and rebuilt when needed.

Turning stands on

1. Settings, Remote and stands, Stands: turn on Serve charts and scores to stands. It is off until you do. iOS may ask for local network permission the first time.
2. The card shows an address like http://192.168.1.23:51828/. Open it in any browser on a stand, on the same network. Nothing to install, and no internet needed.
3. Optional: set a stand password, at least six characters. A stand types it once. It must be different from the Remote Control password; the card refuses one that is the same. Changing it sends every stand back to the password prompt and leaves Remote Control phones alone. With no stand password, anyone on the network can read the charts, and nobody can control anything.
4. The link choice on this card is shared with Remote Control: changing it on one changes it for both.

On the stand

• The page follows whichever song is armed on the iPad, and fetches the next one ahead of time.
• Tap Part to choose Chart or a part by name. The stand remembers its own choice.
• If the armed song has no part by that name, it says so - "No Keys part in this song" - and lists what the song does have. It never shows another part instead.
• A chart wraps to the screen with each chord above its word, and has a text size button (small, medium, large).
• A score shows one whole page upright, two pages side by side on a tablet turned sideways, and one page to the width on a phone turned sideways. Turn with a tap on the right or left edge, a swipe, the arrow keys, or a Bluetooth page-turner pedal.
• Full goes full screen where the browser allows it.
• If the stand hears nothing from the iPad for three seconds it says "not connected" and keeps showing what it has.

Only lighting and the remote need one. Audio, video and MIDI over DIN do not.

Reading the link

Settings -> Network says whether you are on a wired link, Wi-Fi or nothing, and what each service is bound to. Debug -> NETWORK lists every interface by name and address - the quickest way to tell whether an adapter is really there.

Pinning a service to a link

Each of the three network users - DMX output, DMX capture, the remote - can be set to any link, wired only or Wi-Fi only, each in its own area: the first two in Lighting, the third in Remote and stands. Pinning lighting to wired means it will not quietly fall back to Wi-Fi and stutter; a service pinned to a link that is not present says so rather than pretending.

A wire for lights, Wi-Fi for everything else

1. A USB-C Ethernet adapter at each end, one cable between them, or both on a switch.
2. Fixed addresses: lighting machine 192.168.10.1, iPad 192.168.10.2, mask 255.255.255.0, no router.
3. Restart the lighting software after the link is up — most only offer destinations whose interface existed when they started.
4. Leave Wi-Fi on. It carries MIDI and the phone remote at the same time.

One file. Everything that matters. Nowhere near the internet.

What is in it

Every song folder whole — audio, MIDI, video, lighting, names, levels, waveforms — every set, every backdrop, every design you dropped in, and the rig's own profile. Left out: where the show last stopped, developer recordings and exported logs.

Backing up

1. Back Up Now. It checks there is room first.
2. Choose where it goes in the Files app — a USB stick, a cloud folder, anywhere you like.
3. It is refused while anything is playing.

Restoring

1. Restore… and pick the file.
2. It shows what it would replace and what it would add before doing anything.
3. Rig settings come back only if you tick the box — another iPad's outputs and MIDI destination may not suit this one.
4. Nothing is moved into place until every part has been read, so a half-copied file leaves your library untouched.

One Dropbox folder, several iPads, and nobody wondering whether their copy is the current one.

What it is

A shared show is one folder in Dropbox that holds the band's songs, and several devices that keep themselves level with it. Somebody re-bounces a stem on a Mac and drops it in. Somebody fixes an alignment on the night. Everybody else's iPad notices, says which song, and takes it when they ask it to.

It is not a new place to keep your music. It is the folder you almost certainly already have, with the app taught to read it.

Why your iPad still keeps its own copy

The honest answer to "can we have one copy of the truth": the folder is the truth, and your iPad keeps a copy of it anyway. That is deliberate, and it is the oldest rule in this app - a prepared show runs with no internet at all. A venue's Wi-Fi is not something a set should depend on, and a backing track streamed out of a cloud folder mid-song is exactly the failure this app exists to prevent.

So the folder is where the band exchanges work, and the iPad is where the show plays from. What disappears is not the second copy. It is the guessing.

Dropbox, and only Dropbox

The app talks to Dropbox itself rather than through the Files app, and that is not a preference. It was built the other way first - one folder picked in Files, which would have reached Drive, OneDrive, iCloud and a USB stick too - and two devices disproved it in an evening: the same file, in the same shared folder, read through each device's own Files provider, came back as different bytes with different dates and no error on either side. A bandmate's published change could sit unnoticed until somebody opened the file by hand.

Dropbox answers the question properly. It computes a hash of every file and reports it in the listing, so the app can tell which copies differ without downloading anything - a check moves no media at all, however big the show is.

The other two were tried and will not do it. Google Drive was built and then measured: the free permission an app can ask for covers what it created and what you picked, and picking a folder conveys nothing about what is in it - a folder with one file in it listed as empty, with no error. A stem your guitarist drops in from a Mac is invisible by that same rule, which is the whole job. The engine behind it is written and costs nothing, in case Google ever ships a scope that can read a folder. iCloud has no interface of this kind at all.

Using a folder you already have

This is the ordinary case, not a special one. You already have a folder per song with the stems in it. Point the app at it.

The app looks at what is in the folder and decides which of three things is happening. There is no mode to pick and get wrong.

It also recognises the two folders that are not a show: one holding loose audio, which is a single song's own folder (it says so, and says to try the folder that one is in), and one with nothing shaped like a song in it at all, which almost always means the wrong folder was picked. Nothing is written in either case.

What a song folder has to look like

Less than you would expect. The folder's name is the song's name - yours already are. Any .wav, .aiff, .caf, .m4a or .mp3 in it is a track, in name order, keeping whatever it is called. MIDI and video keep their names too: a song's Black Parade.mid or Helena Live.mov is found as it stands.

The one case the app will not guess at is two MIDI files, or two videos, in one song folder. It takes neither rather than picking, because a video picked wrong is on a screen an audience is watching and a MIDI file picked wrong is a program change on somebody else's rig that nobody can see. Name the one you meant and it is used. Everything else - song.set, Ableton's .asd files, notes, artwork - is left alone and travels with the song.

A Logic or GarageBand project in a song's folder stays where it is and travels to nobody else: it is a folder of hundreds of files wearing one name, and carrying it would put all of them in every listing and every check.

Setting one up

Two ways to the same sheet: New Song on the Songs screen has a Dropbox tile, and Settings has a File sharing area of its own. It is its own area rather than part of Backup on purpose - a backup is one file taken against disaster and restored whole, a shared show is a folder a band keeps in step song by song, and somebody looking for one and finding the other is being offered the opposite of what they came for.

1. Connect Dropbox. Once, on this device. Nothing leaves the iPad at this point.
2. Choose a folder, one level at a time, in the app. You are choosing the folder that holds the song folders - Middlenight Men, not one song inside it and not Band above it. You can make a new folder here too, so there is no trip to Dropbox and back.
3. Read what it found. It says which of the three above is about to happen, and how many songs, before anything is written.
4. Say where the songs should be filed - a library folder on this iPad, offered with the shared folder's own name. That is how your Songs screen is organised and changes nothing in Dropbox.
5. Let it run. A thirty-song set is several gigabytes and is bounded by your broadband, not by the app. Do it at home the night before, not at the venue. It is safe to leave: nothing reaches your Songs screen until a song is complete and checked, so an interrupted download leaves you with fewer songs rather than broken ones.

Publishing rather than joining - a set you built on this iPad and no shared folder yet - is the same sheet with an empty folder. One step comes first and nobody guesses it: put the set's songs in one library folder (Songs, Bulk Edit, select them, Move to folder), because a shared show covers a library folder and the app needs to know which songs you mean. A set only travels when every song in it is in that folder, since a set half in and half out would leave everybody else with a running order naming songs they will never have.

What travels, and what stays here

The right-hand column is the rig, and it is why a shared show is safe between iPads with different hardware: a four-output interface and a phone with two outputs can hold the same songs and each send them where they need to go. If the rig travelled, the first sync would hand somebody a routing map for an interface they have never owned.

Waveforms, meter envelopes and video filmstrips do not travel either, and that is a fix rather than an omission. They are rebuilt from the media on each device anyway, so sharing them bought nothing - and because each one records the date of the file it describes, and Dropbox rewrites dates on upload, every device rebuilt them on arrival and published a change back. Two devices can keep that going for ever. Excluding them stopped it.

A week in the life

1. Tuesday, on the Mac. You re-bounce the bass for a song and drop the file into its folder in Dropbox, over the old one. Nothing else to do.
2. Wednesday, on your iPad. The File sharing row says that song has changed. You tap it, and the new bass lands. Your alignment and your track names are untouched: only the file that moved is replaced.
3. Thursday, at a rehearsal. The deputy spots that a video is a frame or two late and fixes it in the alignment window. His iPad says he has something to publish. He publishes.
4. Friday, before the gig. Your Line Check says you are behind the band. You take the update, and nothing of yours is lost.

Each of those is one tap, and none of them is "download the folder again". Every publish after the first sends only what actually changed, which is usually one stem.

When things disappear

A shared folder has a particular way of going wrong: a folder that has not finished syncing down looks exactly like one somebody has emptied. The app will not act on that.

• A song that has gone is never removed silently. You are told which songs, by name, and asked first.
• A folder that has lost most of itself is treated as something to go and look at rather than a pile of deletions. Nothing on your iPad is changed, and it says so in as many words.
• If somebody deletes a song by accident and you are the only one who still has it, you can take the update and keep that song - it then becomes something your iPad offers to publish back. It also says who published the change that removed it, so you know whom to ask.
• A file still being uploaded is skipped, not taken half-finished. The folder is read twice a few seconds apart, and anything still growing waits for the next check.
• A publish that would remove most of what this iPad last took is refused outright, because that is usually a restore that has not finished rather than somebody retiring songs.

Two devices, one song, both edited

If you and somebody else change the same song between checks, that song is a conflict and nothing is decided for you. The details sheet lists them and you answer each one: keep mine, or take theirs. Changes to different songs never conflict, and two devices making the same edit is not a conflict either.

A song somebody has put in the folder that is not part of the show yet is offered, never taken automatically: the details sheet names it and you say whether it belongs. Deriving membership from whatever is in the folder would turn one person's tidy-up into a deletion on four iPads.

Two bands

A shared show covers one of your library folders, so two bands are two shared shows with two folders and nothing in common. A song can only be in one. Tidying your library on a Tuesday cannot remove anything from anybody's show - what a show contains is the folder's own statement, not a guess from how you have filed things.

Quick answers

These describe the rig and stay on this device. A list of areas down the left, the settings themselves on the right, and every one of them says what it does, when you would change it, and what it would do to a running show.

The two marks on a row

They answer different questions and it is worth keeping them apart. The effect mark says what changing this would do to a show that is playing right now:

The dot beside the title says whether the thing itself is working: green when it is plugged in and answering, amber when it wants a look, and absent when there is nothing to say.

A few settings stage rather than apply: screen latency and the lighting delay collect their steps and write them on Save, with Revert beside it, because nudging a number ten times should not be ten writes to the rig. And four changes ask once before landing mid-show — turning off video output, turning off lighting output, turning off the phone remote, and switching the MIDI destination — since each one takes something away from a stage that is currently using it.

Twelve areas, in four groups

THE RIG holds Audio, Video, Lighting, MIDI, Remote and stands and Network. HOW IT LOOKS holds Showtime screen and Theme. LOOKING AFTER IT holds File sharing, Backup and Troubleshooting. THE APP holds Full version, on its own and last, because it is a fact about the app rather than a job to do to the rig (chapter one).

Audio

Video

Lighting

MIDI

Remote and stands

The ready board - the shared page for band, FOH and monitors, which signals people and controls nothing - sits in the Network area rather than this one.

Network

Showtime screen

Theme, File sharing, Backup, Troubleshooting and Full version

What it means, and what to send afterwards.

Two panels on it are worth knowing about. The system event log carries MIDI, transport and faults, filterable by kind and kept for the whole session rather than cleared at each stop. Diagnostics carries the numbers behind the plain-words warnings — routing, meter health, dropouts, timing.

A · What is on disk

Everything the app writes is plain, versioned and yours. A song folder holds its audio, its MIDI file, its video and its song-lighting.dmx - the MIDI file and the video may be called anything, since a song assembled by copying files in is a supported way to build one - plus tracks.json (names, order, levels, buses, offsets), waveform.json and levels.json, and video-filmstrip.bin (the stills the alignment window shows, rebuilt whenever needed). tracks.json also holds the song's alignment: its video shift, DMX shift and markers. A song may also hold a chart file and PDF score parts, with their prepared pages in a hidden .score-pages folder that a backup leaves out. Sets live in Playlists/, backdrops in Backdrops/, designs in Designs/, and the rig's own settings in profile.json.

B · The themes

Nine ship, and each one answers a different working condition rather than a different taste in colour. They differ in shape, depth, density and type as well - a theme is not a repaint, and no two of them are allowed to differ in colour alone.

Any design dropped into Files appears beside them with no rebuild.

C · The collapsed sidebar

D · Developer harnesses

One screen exists for building the app rather than running a show, reached by launch argument in a development build. The design gallery that used to sit beside it is gone: the two halves an operator actually wanted from it — looking for new designs, and exporting the current one as a template — are rows in Settings' Theme area instead.

E · The rules, once more

• One clock: the audio. Everything else follows it.
• Nothing plays by itself, ever.
• The alignment window has a Save, and nothing is written until you press it. The mixer has none and keeps as you go, with Undo to step back. The one exception either way is a fader moved on the song that is playing: it is heard at once and written when the show stops, never during it.
• The alignment window's preview and the show never play at the same time.
• Heavy work happens before the show, not during it.
• Nothing needs the internet - not playing a show, and not a trial that has already started.
• Your show data is plain, versioned files you can read and copy.
• Anything that cannot be done right now says why.