I received my new refurbished Mac Mini M2 Pro last friday (side note: Apple could sell refurb stuff as new!) and I quickly set up my usual music production workflow (that means installing Logic, a lot of Arturia, Korg and Native Instruments stuff and Da Vinci for a “Thriller” cover I’m preparing for Halloween). Easy peasy and no main biggies with Sonoma.
But the Mac Mini has no built-in display, and with my previous MBP I used a two display set-up for having a onscreen musical keyboard while learning the chords and whatnot, now I am bound to only one screen.
My mind being as brilliant as usual said: “Hey, I can run this magic thingie that puts a macOS window on the iPad screen and put that screen on top of the piano keyboard, that would be great”. I am somewhat confused about the name of this feature (Sidecar? Continuity? Universal Access? who knows) but lo and behold I managed to put a Synthesia window from macOS on the iPad screen and have it receive MIDI events from Logic, so the notes sent to Synthesia were highlighted in the iPad screen.
And that’s where the real thriller begins: the Synthesia window being “projected” from the Mac desktop to the iPad simply freezes and stops updating after about 20-30 seconds. Interestingly, in this state the connection between table and desktop is not gone: I can trigger Synthesia sounds from the iPad with the Apple Pencil, but without any display refresh on the iPad so it is basically unuseable.
Both devices are the latest generations available (iPad Pro 12.9’’ from 2023 and 2023 Mac Mini M2 Pro) and both are running the latest Apple operating systems (Sonoma and iOS 17) and yet it doesn’t work and no fiddling has made this issue disappear. I changed Wi-Fi Networks, disabled some Universal Access settings in the mac, disabled screen locking on the iPad…. to no avail.
Also I’ve seen this behaviour with other macOS apps with Sidecar: for example if I send Logic Pro itself to the iPad screen it stops refreshing after the same 20-30 seconds so it doesn’t seem to be a Synthesia thing.
Has anyone suffered something like this?
NB: I think I could get away by using native iPadOS Synthesia on the iPad and receive MIDI events thorugh USB or Bluetooth MIDI but that’s not my point: the thing is that the Sidecar feature is exactly broken using the latest and greatest hardware and software Apple has to offer!