Bandin

BandInPad

Multitrack playback for live bands. Your stems, your click, your markers, each row going out where you want it.

What it does

You bring the separate tracks of a song: drums, bass, keys, horns, a guide vocal, and the click. BandInPad plays them together, in time, and sends each one where it belongs. Everything in stereo to the speakers, or every row to its own output on your audio interface, so the sound engineer has them apart.

While it plays, you can:

Setlists, sets and squares

A setlist is the running order for one evening, and you can keep as many as you like: one per band, one per venue, one for rehearsals. A set is one item in that order, which can be a single song or a whole medley. A square is one song inside a set.

You add a set by pointing the app at the folder with that song's stems. The folder can live anywhere: the internal disk, a USB stick, an external SSD. If you would rather not carry a drive to the gig, one button copies the stems inside the app, and the machine then plays that set with nothing plugged in.

Each setlist keeps its own settings: volumes, pans, mutes, markers with their tempo and key, words and chords. The same set put in two setlists can be set up two different ways, and the audio is not copied twice.

On stage

The buttons you press while the song is playing sit together, on the left of the top bar: the beat 1 lamp, play, pause, stop, the tempo, the key, and lock. What you set before you start sits in its own group, and the tools sit at the end.

Anything the app needs to tell you appears as a line at the very bottom of the screen: an output that went missing, a tablet running an older version, a file it could not find. Never a popup in the middle of a song.

Handing over between songs

With crossfade on, you press the next set while one is still playing and the app hands over by itself: the playing set moves to the new tempo over two bars, fades out, and the new one comes in right on beat 1, at its own tempo. If those two bars are not there, the set you pressed simply waits for stop, and the log says so. With crossfade off, it behaves the old way.

Carrying a setlist to another machine

Export writes either a small settings file, good as a backup, or a whole folder with the settings, the stems and a check list of every file and what it weighs. Carry the folder over, press import, and the other machine needs no drive.

What it needs from you

The tempo and the bars are read from your click track, which is an audio track like the others and has to sit inside the song's own folder together with the rest of the stems. That is the one thing the app cannot do without: no click, no tempo, and everything that sits on bars - markers, the words, the ruler - has nothing to sit on. The app will still play the set, but it tells you first.

Keyboards

BandInPad sends the MIDI clock out, so your keyboards and your pedals hold the song's own tempo - the one read from the click track, including the changes you make on stage. You pick which MIDI outputs it goes to in SETUP > Keyboards. The clock is all it sends: no patch changes.

Devices

iPad and Mac. The same setlists, laid out for fingers on the tablet and for a mouse on the computer.

Privacy

No account, no server, no analytics. See the BandInPad privacy policy.

Questions

The full manual is on the help page, and the same text is inside the app, where it works without internet. Anything else: contact@bandin.ro or WhatsApp.