I use a dedicated (older) iPadAir 2 for Strummachine in my music room.
I was always wondering why the batter drained so quickly, e.g. I had the iPad fully charged yesterday morning, then used SM for about 30 mins yesterday evening and this evening the battery was down to 20% although I had not used the iPad at all since yesterday evening.
I checked the battery status, and lo and behold, SM had drained the battery over night and during this day: The usage time for SM was 21+hrs which accounted for the 80% battery drain.
Is that a known issue?
What I will do from now on is to kill SM altogether after I am done playing for the day.
Well, really you should be turning your old iPad off when you’re not using it become the OS will also be eating up battery with whatever is running in the background. Try leaving iMovie, Photos, Pages or any other Apple apps running in the background. Surprise! Your battery is drained. The iPad Air 2 came out in 2014. It’s now 2022. Technology marches forward with great improvements. I would mange battery usage by shutting it down when not in use. For most battery usage, after 5 years the batteries start heading south fast. And as the battery degrades, the ability of the OS of read what it’s doing down degrades too. This means you may be getting false reading of charge usage. Eventually the battery will show full charged but only last 1/2 hour with simple usage, at which point you’ll always have to have it plugged in. Or get a new devices.
You are correct with all you write. I do have a new iPad for my normal work, I use the old one just for SM.
Still I was surprised that SM drained the battery overnight almost complete. When you don’t kill the background process there always is some drain but usually it is not as bad as I saw with SM.
I thought I’d report it because it could point to some issue that is not related to my admittedly old iPad.
Well, you’re right and wrong. You charged the battery full. However at this stage in its life full is not the original full, just what the battery is currently capable of holding. That might be 50% of when it was new, or even much less. So it’s easy to run it down quickly with things that don’t seem that drastic. I’m a former software developer for mobile devices, so I am aware that perception of battery capacity can be greatly mislead as they age. Kind of like our brains
Thanks for reporting your experience, Stefan. I am puzzled as to why you saw 21+ hours of usage in the iPad’s battery report. Strum Machine does not operate in the background so it shouldn’t use up any battery, old device or new.
I did a test with my (2-year-old) iPad just now; started playback in Strum Machine, pressed stop, then turned off the screen and walked away. Hours later, no battery had been used, and no background usage was reported.
My only guess is that you are walking away from the iPad without turning off the screen. The Strum Machine app disables the automatic screen timeout, so that you can refer to the chart without the screen turning off on you all the time. But the tradeoff is that if you forget to turn off the screen (or at least go to the home screen of the iPad), the screen will stay on until the battery runs out, even if SM isn’t playing.
If you continue seeing background battery drain even after ensuring that the screen is turned off, I would definitely be curious to know that.
Hi Luke -
I did some more experiments and watched the charging/battery usage profiles during the past couple of weeks. However, I could not reproduce the high battery drain, everything seems normal now. It must have been a one-time fluke.
