Hello Magic friends. I thought I would share some cool info with you. My best friend Joe Trammel made me aware of this new way of using music.. A lot of magician like to do the show without out a sound man.. This not only saves you money, but gives you complete control. Here is the new deal..
IF you have a I phone watch and a I phone, your in business. You can control your I tunes on your I phone with the I phone watch.. It's super cool and user friendly.. In my Branson show, I have a sound man and use crazy amounts of music. But if I need to run off and do 20 or 30 min at a event.. This is the way to go.. I love it.. I thought I would share it with you guys.. Thanks to my Buddy Joe..

Hi Taylor, I have an iPhone but have never owned an Apple Watch, they were a little pricey but I guess the earlier models have come down in price a bit. I'm supposing you're referring to using this with a portable PA that has a Bluetooth input (a lot of them do), as you probably know there are a couple problems with Bluetooth, one is limited range for most configurations of hardware and versions of Bluetooth, the other is compatibility, I haven'y done any surveys about specific PAs but "compatibility support" is one thing that Bluetooth isn't really very good at themselves (especially since CSR was purchased by Qualcomm), and if you have to rely on "customer support" for your Bluetooth at the manufacturer of an Asian-made PA system then good luck. The other option (the one you're probably NOT using) is to set up Apple Play over wifi, reportedly this will work if you use something like an Apple TV to receive the audio, but there's a ginormous (I think it's a full 2 seconds) delay between what you send out and what the audience can hear, that might be OK just for music but it's pretty useless for sound FX if you use them. And of course either way you're still left without a real solution for a low-latency wireless microphone, or maybe I've misread this and you didn't really need to be wireless in the first place. I don't know really what the combination of iPhone and Apple Watch gives you, I keep my regular music base on a $26 Chinese-made "imitation iPod" that I guess I could plug into a Bluetooth transmitter if I just wanted to play some music along with the presentation, it would still be subject to the limitations that I outlined, but I would encourage you to keep thinking about it, maybe others can offer their own solutions in reply.

You plug your I phone into the sound system and your I phone watch triggers with no delay..
It's pretty good stuff.

Thanks

Taylor

Fair enough, my assumptions were based on the issue that many performers don't want a wire around that they might trip over! Now if you also have something like a Countryman mic and want to use it too there are mixers small enough to fit in an inside coat pocket ("JUST mixer" comes to mind in its several variations, although I don't have any experience with it as far as whether it's noisy, Roland has one too) so you could keep it down to one wire total. This certainly isn't a problem outdoors, if you're inside though you won't need to "ride the gain" for the mic so long as you stay at least 1.5 times the "critical distance" of that particular room away from either speaker at all times you can set the gain once and forget it. (I apologize in advance as this may have been TMI!...)

There is no wire to trip on.. You plug your Phone into the sound system and then you go on stage and your I PHONE WATCH is the trigger.
Cordless trigger.. Works great and every time..
I hope that this makes sense..

It seems better than any system that I've seen on the market thus far.

Thanks,,
TR

Your description is still a bit "off the money", the music is actually sync'ed between the Apple Watch and the iPhone so if you "trigger" the Watch you're actually playing music from it to the iPhone. Then again it's a bit of a confusing situation because when the two are paired the music can actively "switch" between using Bluetooth and using Wifi (and it will use whichever mechanism uses the lowest energy at the time), and unlike Apple Play when using Wifi in this manner there IS NOT some mandated long delay between transmitter and receiver (I believe there could be SOME). I suppose this feature will give you a bit better range than Bluetooth alone, then again if one of the devices can no longer see the other there is the possibility the devices could become "unpaired" and would then fail to work and that certainly wouldn't be good! Now there are actually sound FX players available that use simple triggers, and there are "key fob" dongles available that have up to 4 buttons, but they're not very immune to "falsing" since they don't have any discernable protocol because they work on simple carrier detection, the only real advantage is they're cheap but I wouldn't recommend them (you can see both items on the Adafruit website). But no the iPhone-Apple Watch arrangement is actually sending music (I don't think there's even any way a custom app could change that, it's too far into the Apple ecosystem), if it works well for you that's great and it might be a little more robust than "naked" Bluetooth but no it's not actually sending any triggers or anything as far as I'm aware.

Jeffel, maybe you should write a book, or be more specific when using your jargon, and give a definition, as you type, as I have no idea what you are talking about at all.

Yet, I understand Taylor Reed completely. He uses one device to communicate with the other, both the same brand, so compatibility will not be an issue. Yes, playing music off the I-phone is what most magicians do. I believe I have seen your post before, meaning you have been on the Café previously, so you have gotten a feel for what magicians what, and use in their shows.

Thanks for your comments.

Well Bill, I sure hope most magicians are at least aware that when you play a smartphone over a large sound system you really ought to make sure the files you're playing are either ".alac" type (for Apple devices such as iPhones) or ".flac" (for most non-Apple devices) because they're compressed losslessly, the other "lossy" filetypes like ".mp3" or ".aac" can sound HORRIBLE over a set of big speakers, and I definitely would have second thoughts about subjecting an audience to that! I've never owned an Apple Watch, I believe they work with ".alac" files just like the phones but I'm not sure. Anyway I'm absolutely NOT trying to confuse anyone, for the best possible results you either ought to really understand what you're doing in the first place or get yourself prepared and study up on it or else hire somebody with experience who knows how to produce a professional result in that department for you. If you're going to take umbrage about advice like THAT then I agree I'm probably wasting my time here.

All I know is it works and I have friends that are making money using it.. I don't know how to build a computer, but it works..
I never question how it works. It sounds like your not a fan of the I phone watch working for music..
Not sure.. I'm just happy that it's on the market.. I just wanted to spread the good news.

https://www.technobuffalo.com/2015/04/23......H0eMoV10


NOTE... It sounds like the word TRIGGER is where all the confusion has arrived..
I guess I used the wrong word. EXAMPLE...............It's just like a TV remote control that changes channels for your TV.
SO the Watch becomes your remote control that changes the music on your I phone. It's actually very simple and works every time..
You should go try it so you know more about it.

OMG, an MP3 can sound HORRIBLE over large speakers? I can't believe I'm reading this drivel...
Please stop giving opinions on something you obviously know nothing about.

Get off it Mike, anyone with a pair of ears can hear the difference, and a great many people are genuinely irritated. I've owned a pair of professional studio monitor speakers for my personal use since 1978 and I used to design professional studio recording equipment (custom multichannel sound consoles) for a living. The human ear is a remarkably sensitive instrument and it's a plain fact that you can't discard 90% of the audio samples (going from uncompressed PCM format to MP3) and not expect to be able to hear the difference. The sound that you hear nowadays in a movie theater for a theatrical release doesn't use these phony space-saving algorithms, it's only the home consumer and that was only for DVDs, they don't use it for the modern Blu-Ray home release format, they can't "get away with it" anymore BECAUSE IT SOUNDS AWFUL. (I actually own patents in the field of processing digital audio.)
The main reason we're stuck with so many people THINKING that MP3 versions of songs "sound OK" can be attributed to the greed of one Steve Jobs and his company looking for something to put music on to sell that was small and cheap. I'm not going to "start a ****ing contest" here because I have too much respect for this website but if you want to know whose opinion is suspect here I'd strongly advise looking in the mirror.

It's quite simple to make the comparison actually, you just take a CD that you want to listen to, install Exact Audio Copy on your system and have it make am MP3 version of any song you wish to compare, and switch directly between the CD and the compressed version, most people can hear the difference within seconds.

Virtually all magicians use the MP3 format for their music in large sound systems, seems you're the only one who can tell the difference.

Actually if you know the difference and still use "compressed" files in your performances it tells me something about how much respect you have for your customers' perceptive abilities - and their money!

You can find CD (uncompressed) copies of just about any music in commercial release in one of your friendly local libraries, and check it out at no charge for three weeks or more. The reason I mentioned Exact Audio Copy specifically is that many people are ALSO not aware that the CD music format has not one but TWO "overlapping" error correction strategies on each disk! If you use the program I mentioned to read a CD of a removable media computer drive it'll use that information to correct any errors it finds, that won't fix EVERY problem but if the program senses it can't faithfully recover the information in a near-bit-accurate manner it'l let you know and give up. I've had it do that on maybe 1 cut in every 250 or so, which is a pretty amazing result considering that in a public library people aren't generally too careful handling these disks (in other words it'll work despite the presence of visible scratches). If you tell EAC to store the music in one of the formats I mentioned above it does take about 6 times as much space (roughly 24 megabytes/minute) as an MP3 but that's still about a 40% saving from the way it's stored on the CD, and that's still a tiny amount of the many gigabytes available on a modern smartphone or microSD flash drive. And I doubt it really takes any longer to go through this process than it does to pick out the material in the first place, EAC typically runs about 1.7 times as fast as just playing the disk to listen to it...

This is the SYSTEM I use in my Branson shows.

https://figure53.com/qlab/

I don't have all the answers, I have guys that know how to do just about anything I need.

Killer system

Taylor

What I do for small shows:

Equipment:

iPhone X
Apple Watch
Go Button app
Connection to sound system (or Bluetooth to Bluetooth speaker for very small shows)

Method:

1. Set up my show cues on Go Button, complete with fades, loops, auto-follows, etc.
2. Link my iPhone to Apple Watch via Bluetooth
3. Link my iPhone to sound system via hard connection (or for very small venues, via Bluetooth to Bluetooth speaker)
4. Open Go Button on my iPhone
5. Control all music cues by simply tapping my Apple Watch

I get full, seamless, sophisticated music with a nonchalant touch of my wrist. With Go Button programmed with my show, all cues are just a tap. I don't even have to look at the watch.

I have also used a button control in a pocket instead of the iPhone, but I'm afraid of inadvertently hitting it, so I don't do that anymore, though I know folks who have great success with that.

OK I'll admit I was a little confused. Yes the communications between an Apple Watch and an iPhone occurs over Bluetooth (and I still think Wifi has to be working too), but there's a somewhat obscure Bluetooth profile called Audio Video Remote Control Profile (AVRCP) that actually can send what you were referring to as "triggers" but they're a LITTLE limited in that they mostly just go forward or backward in a list (and not call up sound cue #943 at random), but with the added capability that the Go Button app CAN make that transition into a crossfade or many other things, in other words many of the capabilities aren't "native to Bluetooth AVRCP" or "native to iOS devices" but they are synthesized in the process of an interaction BETWEEN AVRCP and the Go Button app. Now that communication ALSO requires that a little program called the "Now Playing" app (that I never heard of before either) has to be running on the Apple Watch too. Now there are even provisions in Go Button to implement features such as Midi Show Control (MSC) commands but it is far from clear whether THOSE can be initiated over AVRCP or exactly how that works, "show control" is as different a topic from audio as DMX lighting is and there are darn few people who understand all of them. And as I think I noted before getting technical information about current Bluetooth profiles from CSR can be a challenge in itself. It's also not real clear whether the display present on the watch will concisely show you what's playing and the status, in other words how much information is being fed back to be viewed. I'd head into an Apple store tomorrow if I thought they could explain all this to me but I suspect they're just about as clueless about much of this as I am, nonetheless to the extent that I might have confused or misled anyone about this topic I am terribly sorry, it certainly wasn't my intent to do so and I hope you can forgive me!

And after thinking about the issue overnight Taylor's and Dana's setups are a bit different. In Taylor's case the iPhone is a bit older and has a headphone jack and he would leave the iPhone near the sound system and plug into it using a short 3.5 mm cable. In Dana's case the iPhone is more recent and it has no jack, she's taking advantage of the issue that recent Bluetooth releases (and newer iPhones) can pair with multiple devices simultaneously, so it would seem she has the choice to either wear the iPhone or leave it near the sound system, but in either case with her situation the sound system should either natively be capable of receiving Bluetooth audio (probably the A2DP profile) or she needs to bring a Bluetooth audio receiver unit with her. I don't think a capability like this exists within the Android ecosystem but clearly I need to do a little more research, in any event my suspicion is Apple came up with this system in order to support people who have to make major presentations and corporate speeches like Tim Cook himself, but if you don't have a need to do such things routinely AND own an Apple Watch it's still kind of an obscure capability.

Here is the simplest way to include music in your show. When cassette tapes were in use, I simply made a recording of the music I was to use. Then got a portable player. When I got to the point in the show to play the background music. I put the establishment's microphone on top of the player. Being I had it set start with pause button, no hard click sound. Pressed the button. With a second or 2 before the music started, I walked into position and began as the music started. I am sure this will work with today's tablets and smart phones. For me it sounded great over the establishment speakers.

I did not have to learn anything about sound, and there were not compatibility issues. Did not have to ask about there system and if everything would match up.

I even pushed the button right in front of everyone, O-M-G as the recorder/player was right there where everyone could see it.

I often got very good comments that they enjoyed the music, and how well I synced my actions to the music. In other words they liked it.

The client hired a magician to present magic, not give them a music concert. I don't consider turning on sound without being seen a magic trick. No one ever said they seen me push that button. Nice thing is it works just about everywhere they have a sound system.

I'd be a little careful trying to use those old cassettes nowadays, the binder in the tape may have deteriorated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome

I upgraded to a CD player when they come out, same results.