Connect your iPad

Opening Downstage on an iPad or phone, making it full screen, and keeping it awake.

The iPad does not need an app. Downstage's screens are web pages served by the laptop, so anything with a browser can open them.

Open it

1. Join the iPad to the same Wi-Fi network as the laptop.
2. Open Safari and go to:

http://downstage.local

That name follows the laptop around: it stays the same when the router gives the laptop a different address, which is the whole reason to use it.

If the name does not work

Some networks — guest Wi-Fi, some venue and hotel networks, a few Android phones — do not pass .local names around. Use the laptop's numeric address instead. Click the Downstage icon in the Mac's menu bar and it lists every address that will work, for example:

http://192.168.0.102

Click one in the menu to copy it. The number can change from one network to the next; the name cannot.

Make it full screen

In Safari, tap Share and choose Add to Home Screen. Downstage gets its own icon, and opens from it without Safari's address bar and toolbars — which gives the show screen back about a tenth of the display.

Keep the screen awake

A web page cannot stop an iPad from sleeping. Before every gig:

Settings › Display & Brightness › Auto-Lock › Never

Set it back afterwards if you like. Keep the iPad on power for a long show.

More than one device

Any number of devices can be connected at once, and each of them is a full controller unless you give them the band view instead. Every screen shows the same thing at the same moment: when one of them arms a jump, all of them turn amber.

On a shared or venue network, set a passcode so that only your own devices can control the show.

If the connection drops

A red banner says Lost the laptop. Live keeps playing. That is exactly what is happening: the music is not affected. The page reconnects by itself, usually within a second or two of the network coming back, and picks up wherever Live is. You do not need to reload it.