Some tips for Helpers

Quite a few of you using Solocontutti will be taking on the role of "helper", by which I mean someone with technical skills who is helping other people to get Solocontutti running smoothly. Although the app is designed to be accessible to someone with zero technical skills, there will always be technical challenges and the app can always be better in this respect. This article to give the helpers more insight into the tools available.

The very first time

Here are some tips for helping someone the very first time they are using the app:

• Try and get them up and running outside of rehearsal time. Nothing is more frustrating than when a whole group of people is waiting for someone to fix a tech problem. Rehearsal time, especially with a larger group, is precious
• Think about using a remote diagnostic tool which allows you to control someone else's computer. This is a lot quicker and more effective than trying to give instructions on the telephone. A good free tool is TeamViewer but you may have your own favourite. This is an enormous time saver
• Do a sound check and make sure all the channels are coming through correctly. 
• My advice to new users is to use the "Mon" button to monitor yourself. This needs to be turned on explicitly (in a future version this will be the default)

We are continually improving the usability of the app and the aim is to allow completely non-technical users install and play on the first go. Your feedback helps with this.

Connectivity vs. Sound

Broadly speaking you can have problems with either your audio pathway, or your connectivity (or both. There are two types of connectivity problems and a whole range of potential audio problems.

First tip - never skip the setup wizard and don't ignore problems it reports: the wizard is your friend.

Firstly there may be a problem connecting to the server. The app will specifically tell you if this is a problem. Usually this will be a problem with your local network connectivity (so check that first) but on rare occasions the server may be unavailable. You should try opening the website www.solocontutti.com - if you can't reach it you almost definitely have a problem with your local network.

The second type of connection is between you and other players in the session. This connection does not go via the server (peer-to-peer) and can sometimes be tricky to connect because home networks are not designed to allow this sort of connection and sometimes actively block this. Company networks will very often block this sort of connection and you will need to user port forwarding or similar to make it work. Solocontutti won't report the error because it expects it to go wrong a few times and will keep on trying forever. If you have trouble making a connection after the wizard has reported that a connection has worked, you can try leaving and entering the session a few times which often helps. There are more sophisticated tools for difficult connections, but they are outside the scope of this blog and will be covered later.

If after setting up you can't get a connection it's worth using the Reflect Test. This sends encoded sound to the server which is returned to you and played out. The advantage of the reflect tester is that you can check that the audio and encoding is working without worrying about connectivity problems. Note: you should ignore the latency as the test server is located in the Netherlands.

There is one case where audio actually affects the network connection. If the audio driver is not working properly no audio data will be sent and the other side will eventually assume that there is a communication failure and reset the connection. It always pays to test that the audio is working before digging into the connection.

When it works, but not very well

At some point everything will be working functionally, but perhaps not well enough. There may be dropouts, or crackles or other types of noise. There are a few things to check:

• Make sure there is enough network capacity. Solocontutti uses relatively little network capacity (although this can go up quite a lot with video) but it does require a lot of network availability. So if someone else in your household is streaming, or downloading or backing up over the network this will definitely cause problems
• Try to avoid using WiFi if you can. WiFi works fine, but is prone to interference. For most apps if you have a loss of signal for 100 milliseconds this is not a big deal but since Soloconutti aims for sub-30ms latencies this will be a problem. The app does compensate for lost data, but this has its limits.

There are also some tools to help diagnose performance problems. In particular the performance monitor under the advanced settings will help see if your computer is being overloaded. If your computer is struggling there are couple of things you can do:

• Increasing the buffer  size will reduce the load on the system, at the expense of increasing latency. It is not just your buffer size that matters in this case, but (to a lesser extent) everyone in the session. If you having problems increase everyone's framesize to 512 and see how low you can get by increments before problems arise
• Paradoxically you might be able to improve performance by reducing compression. If you have the bandwidth use the 2x or uncompressed options.

When something goes wrong

Even when the app is functioning perfectly, there are lots of things that can go wrong. Examples are:

• Incorrect settings
• Problems with device drivers
• Internet issues
• Performance problems

Solocontutti provides several tools to help you diagnose problems. 

• First and most obvious the error messages. There are lots of occasions when the app can tell you exactly what the problem is: these should not be ignored. 
• For a number of specific problems there is a Troubleshooting Guide on the website to help with a number of common problems
• For going deeper into the app there is a log file which is continually being written to. You can find the log file in solocontutti.log in the solocontutti folder, which is "My Music" or "Music" by default but can be changed in the settings. The log is mostly self explanatory but a later article will go into some more detail how to use this to diagnose problems.
• You can produce an enriched log by using the "report problem" menu function. This will produce an extended version of the log (you don't have to send the email, but the log will still be available).
• The next level is the console. The console shows exactly the same info as the log file, but there are additional commands you can use:
• You can set a number of parameters for testing purposes which are not available in the settings: Note that the reason that they are not available is that they are only for testing purposes and should be used with caution
• You can enable the verbose logging which shows a lot more information than in the normal log
• You can add filters to the log to focus on exactly the things that you need to know.
• Anything you see on the console will be logged to the log file so that you can check it later

Of course you can always ask for support via the support line. If you need help it is useful if you send a troubleshooting report using the "report problem" menu function. It is best if you send a report from both players just after the problem has occurred.

Occasionally (and rarely) there will be crashes. On all platforms these will be automatically reported to us, but if you have a systematic crash that is stopping you playing, report this directly.