A setlist app that works with no WiFi

Twenty minutes before showtime

If you gig for a living you know this one. The stage is in a cellar, or a marquee, or a converted barn forty minutes outside town. There is a network, technically, but it belongs to the kitchen. Someone’s phone has one bar. Load-in is done, the room is filling, and the thing you need is the set.

Any tool that quietly assumes a connection becomes a problem at exactly that moment. Charts that live in a cloud folder will not open. A shared document will not refresh. And the fallback is what it has always been: paper, shouting, and hoping everyone heard the same song title.

This is the case syncMNFST is built around. Not the demo on good WiFi. The barn.

How offline setlist sync works

The iPads communicate with each other locally, without sending the live show through the internet. With a small stage router they share their own private local network; if that network drops, direct device-to-device connectivity can provide a fallback.

1. You prepare online. At home or in the rehearsal room you build the repertoire, the roles and the sets in the web app. Each iPad pulls that down and keeps it locally.
2. You arrive at the venue. The iPads come out of the bag with everything already on them. Nothing needs to download at the door.
3. The band plays. The leader taps a song, that song goes out over the local connection, and every iPad follows to it and shows the chart for its own role. Each player keeps their own place in the chart.
4. You get home. Back on a normal internet connection, the iPads and web app sync again. Updates made online come down to the devices, while supported changes made on the iPads are synced back to the web app.

What you need on stage

The iPads you already own, running iPadOS 17 or newer. Beyond that, one small piece of kit keeps the whole thing solid.

• A simple local router, recommended. Any cheap travel router works. The iPads join it and share one steady network for the stage. It needs no internet: it is only there to carry traffic between your own iPads.
• Keep WiFi switched on, just don’t join a venue network. The iPads use the WiFi radio to reach each other, so airplane mode (which switches the radio off) stops the sync. To keep notifications off the charts, use a Focus mode instead.
• No SIM cards needed. Cellular models are fine, but the mobile connection is not used during the show. An iPhone can be your backup. From version 1.1, an iPhone can run as a follower device too. It follows the master's song changes and can show your chart or lyrics, giving you a backup that's probably already in your pocket.

No router to hand? The iPads can also connect directly to each other, the way AirDrop does, as a fallback. Either way, do one dry run at home before the first real gig. Pair the iPads, tap through a few songs, watch each screen land on the right chart. The iPad pairing guide walks through it.

Big stages and wide lineups

Direct device-to-device connectivity is useful as a fallback, but the bigger the stage and the band, the more a dedicated local router earns its place.

A ten-piece band spread across a festival stage puts very different demands on a local connection than four musicians standing a few metres apart in a club. That's why we recommend making a small stage router part of your regular rig. It doesn't need internet access. Its only job is to give the band's iPads one stable local network. Keep it in the flight case, power it at load-in and stop thinking about the venue's network altogether.

Where this fits

Running offline is one part of what makes a setlist usable on stage. The other parts are the sync model itself and the charts each player sees.

Start here: the setlist app for working bands. From there, read how to sync setlists across iPads and how role-based sheet music puts the right chart in front of each player.