Most of the best products identify a problem and fix it with the minimum of fuss, that’s exactly what Mix To Mobile does and does it very well. We investigate.
What Is Mix To Mobile?
Mix To Mobile is an AU, VST and AAX plugin for Mac and Windows which streams the audio from any track in your DAW to an iOS or Android device for playback. How a mix will translate to playback over the very limited bandwidth of the internal speakers in a device is important and, until now, rather inconvenient. Various monitoring plugins offer emulations of smartphone speakers along with alternative studio monitors, TVs and boomboxes, but these just aren’t the same as actually playing back on your phone. This is probably because of the inherent volume limitations of a phone compared to an emulation over studio monitors. For this reason most people export a bounce of their mix to their phone for checking. This works but why not just stream the audio directly to the phone for the DAW? This is where Mix To Mobile comes in.
How Does Mix To Mobile Work?
There are two elements to Mix To Mobile: The Sender plugin which is instantiated on whichever track you wish to monitor on your phone, in most cases this will be the master but it doesn’t have to be, then there is the receiving App which can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or Google Play. Once installed these two elements stream lossless audio over WiFi. Latency is low but appreciable, this isn’t suitable for monitoring while tracking.
Audio can be streamed to more than one device at the same time. The streams aren’t synced and you will hear small timing offsets between them if you listen to them both at the same time. Mix To Mobile can be used without WiFi with IOS devices connected via USB if that suits your particular needs. Sample rate mismatches between the DAW and the device are dealt with transparently, with real time conversion. I tested playback at 96KHz without issue.
To use Mix To Mobile instantiate the Sender Plugin in your DAW, launch the app on your device and as long as both are on the same WiFi network, when you tap the Start Listening button in the App the number of listeners in the Sender plugin will change to indicate you are connected and audio will be streamed from your DAW to the mobile device. You can mute playback to the listener(s) using a Mute button under Stream and mute playback to the Studio Monitoring by clicking the Mute button under Passthrough. Playback volume can be adjusted on the device either in the App, or of course using the device’s volume controls.
Anything Else?
It’s neat and it works. A handy extra feature is that once your audio is streaming to your device you can then stream out to a further device using AirPlay. In my case I personally found the ability to stream to to an old B&W Z2 speaker for ‘grot box’ monitoring checks more useful than streaming to my phone’s speaker. Exactly how you view mix checks on smart phones varies widely. Some see it as essential and reflecting how content is consumed in the real world, others view it as mixing to the lowest common denominator (both are right…). I know that while I don’t mix music to references like a mobile phone, I do mix promo videos for social media with that medium in mind and this is ideal for that purpose.
I’ve found this a very useful product, though I do wonder whether people from countries who refer to their phones as their ‘Cell’ or their ‘Handy’ will understand what a Mobile is?
Mix To Mobile is available to buy for $39 and a 30 day free trial is available.