Shure Wireless Workbench^® 6: Flashing (Identifying) Devices

Edited Transcript

This post will explain identification (or flashing) of devices in Wireless Workbench 6.

Wireless Workbench is a great way to manage your Shure networked systems, all from one workstation on a computer. We built the application to effectively simulate the physical devices in your rig within the application in a virtual environment.

One helpful tool to ensure that the virtual devices you are interacting with correspond to the correct physical devices is the "Identify" (or "Flash") feature.

Identify allows you to use the software to send a command to a particular physical device, making its front panel blink.

If you're familiar with Shure devices, you've probably seen this before. There are a lot of different ways that you can flash or identify devices from Workbench.

How To Identify Devices

In the inventory view, there are icons on the left-hand side that represent the different states and statuses for each one of your channels and devices.

The row of left-most icons show the device icons. Device icons are representative of the type of device that we're looking at.

Different wireless systems will have different icons. When an icon is clicked, it will send the Identify command to the device, which makes the LEDs on the screen blink.

This is a great way to identify the system in Wireless Workbench that corresponds to a particular physical wireless system.

You can also right-click on any channel or device, and this Identify command will be an option in the context menu. By selecting that, Wireless Workbench will send the exact same command.

There may be times when you want to make sure that you've discovered all the devices in a particular rack. In this case, you may want to send the flash command to all your devices, in order to visually spot any devices that have not been added to Wireless Workbench (as they will be the only ones to not blink).

To do this, select the button on the bottom of the screen that says, "Flash all devices". When you click that button, all connected devices will light up. This is a great way to confirm that you've discovered all the gear in your rack. If a device does not flash when you press this button, you may want to confirm the network connectivity of that device.

There are also different Identify controls for different groups and scopes of devices.

If your inventory is organized by device type, you are able to click on the organizational headers to identify just that type of device. For example, if you right-click on "In-Ear Monitors", and choose "Flash All", any in-ear monitors that you have connected to Wireless Workbench will be identified. This is another helpful way to identify certain batches of devices.

The last set of flash functionalities lives in the Monitor view. When you right-click on a channel strip for a particular channel or device, the menu will show an option to identify that device.

You can also double-click on the channel strip to open the properties panel, which lays out all the parameters for a particular channel of the selected wireless system.

Besides being able to navigate and view all the properties of the system, you can right-click within the properties panel and send an identify command to either the channel or the device.

This particular function is a feature that only certain systems have currently. We intend to roll this function out to more devices in the future, so you get this granularity if you want to find just one particular channel.