Zoom F8 iOS App Connection Problem Solved

Had another corporate shoot and brought along the Zoom F8 field recorder to record the sound along with my Audio Technica AT4053b hyper-cardioid mike.

This was another shoot where the talent was a corporate executive and in this case we were recording some voice-over to lay into a piece we had recorded the talking head clips a few days earlier. He's sort of a natural presenter so this was a pretty straight-forward gig.

As I was setting up the recorder and mike in his office, I attempted to get the iOS app on my iPhone 6+ connected so I could mix from the phone. But for some reason, even after about 2 minutes of trying, I couldn't get it to connect. The F8 just sat waiting for the phone to show up and the phone kept popping up a message that it was disconnected with a button to retry.

You never want to keep your exec talent waiting so I bailed on the app and jumped into the recording session. The sound was great, albiet a little noisy because the office is located right next to a busy road. But the take was completely usable and because we laid down the tracks at 24-bit, we had plenty of info to get some good noise reduction in post in Izotope RX4 Advanced.

But it annoyed me that I couldn't get the app to connect so that I would have faders to mix while recording (the poteniometers on the unit are gain trim, not faders and not re-assignable from what I can tell). So I spent a little time once I got back to see why I couldn't get them to work well together.

So the first thing I tried was my iPad and it was able to connect first try, not issues at all. Then I tried my phone again and same problem - "Disconnected. Retry?" message again and again.

So I went to my phone's settings, bluetooth and saw that it had the Zoom F8 listed there. I tapped the button to forget this device and bang! It worked right away. Just asked me to type in the password shown on the Zoom.

Not sure why but if you run into problems getting your F8 and iOS device to connect, you might try telling your phone to forget the Zoom F8 under bluetooth settings.