I own two MS Surface Pro laptops (officially, they are “tablets” but they come with a keyboard and everyone seems to use them as small footprint laptops) that I use with AL-PRO/ V Collection X for live performances, specifically a Surface Pro 4 (Win10) and a Surface Pro 7 (Win11). In an effort to reduce setup time and cable clutter, I strapped an MS Surface docking station to my KB stand. The docking station consists of a power brick connected to an accessory connection brick. For the record, I attached my Keylab 61 Essential (USB), an ARRIS SUFRBoard SBG10 router to give the team WiFi access to our Behringer XR-18 mixer (RJ45), and an external ViewSonic VG1655 monitor (USB) to display the X-Air Edit screen to the accessory brick.
I started noticing occasional freeze-ups of the AL-Pro software, (usually in the middle of a significant KB passage, of course), which resulted in the Windows message that the application was non-responsive, do you want to wait or terminate the app. In each instance, I terminated and restarted AL-Pro. Sometimes it worked and we continued thru the night, sometimes not. In the latest iteration of this issue, I also got a MIDI connection failure to the Keylab, and I had to finish out the night chord banging keyboard parts on a guitar.
One thing I did notice was that after termination, a quick look at the running task list (Ctrl-Alt-Del) showed that an AL-Pro background task was still in the list, and I could not manually terminate the task. Unclear if it was some kind of “phantom entry”, or an actual in-memory task. I had to restart the Surface to get rid of the entry. A major buzz kill that my front person had to manage with small talk during the Surface re-boot.
I eventually eliminated the ViewSonic monitor and simply rotated the Surface to portrait display, and displayed both the X-Air Edit and AL-Pro windows on the Surface screen; no improvement.
Then, I noticed that at our practice sessions, when I used a simple USB Dongle with three USB ports and an RJ45 port that I got from Amazon to connect these components together instead of the docking station, the AL-Pro software never failed. So, I eventually started using that dongle in live performances, and so far, so good.
I tried all these configurations on both Surfaces, no difference in results (except for a mild performance improvement on the Pro 7).
I therefore believe that the Surface docking station is somehow producing a conflict with AL-Pro. Could be a bus-level interrupt, memory, port conflict, or other problem maybe related to simultaneously running the X-Air Edit software, but since the problem appears resolved, I’m happy for now (or at least, less unhappy, unless someone can elicit a root cause for the failures).