SPL Cloud Pro

• 1: Pricing and billing
• 2: Shared links
• 3: Reports and pictures
• 4: Alarms
• 5: Remote control and comments

1 - Pricing and billing

The principle

• Pro applies per measurement. You activate it for a single measurement or for all measurements of a job.
• You pay per measuring day. A measuring day counts if the measurement recorded more than one hour of data on that day. The measurement’s day boundary is decisive.
• There is a cap per measurement and year. Once reached, Pro continues free of charge until the end of the measuring year.
• No subscription, no base fee. A measurement without data costs nothing.

Prices

You find the current prices on spl.swiss. The model:

• The first measuring days of a measurement cost more; from the 7th measuring day, a lower daily price applies.
• There is a cap per measurement and measuring year. Once reached, Pro continues free of charge until the end of the measuring year.
• The measuring year lasts 365 days from the measurement’s first measuring day (if it has no data yet: from the day of activation). After that, a new measuring year begins and counting starts again at the first day.
• Prices exclude VAT.

Before each activation, SPL Cloud shows the price and, if data has already been recorded, the exact amount. If prices change, a measurement that is already activated keeps the price at the time of its activation.

Prerequisite: payment method

Before you activate Pro, the owner of the measurement needs a payment method and a billing address. The billing address is needed for VAT.

For Pro on a job, the owner of the job needs the payment method.

1. Choose the Billing currency: CHF or EUR. It cannot be changed afterwards.
2. Click Set up payment. Payment is handled by the payment service Stripe; there you choose the payment method and enter the billing address. You can see there which payment methods are available.
3. Back in SPL Cloud, Payment method and billing address saved. is shown.

The invoice is addressed to the person or organization that owns the payment method. Manage billing opens your invoices at Stripe and lets you change the payment method. For an organization, the Billing language in the organization details determines the language of the invoices.

Activating Pro

For a measurement

1. Open the measurement. On the side, Get Pro! shows the included features and the price.
2. Click Activate Pro and confirm.

For a job

On the job page, Activate Pro for the job. All measurements of the job are then Pro, including those added later. Each measurement is still billed individually by its measuring days, with its own cap.

The owner of the job pays, also for measurements that belong to someone else. Measurements for which their owner has already activated Pro directly continue to be paid by that owner. Details under Different owners.

Free test hour

The first time you activate a measurement directly, you have one hour to try it out. There is no test hour when activating via the job. If you deactivate Pro within that hour, it costs nothing, not even for days already recorded. While the test hour is running, the measurement shows Free test hour running.

Retroactive billing

Pro is billed from the measurement’s first measuring day, not from the time of activation. If you activate Pro for a measurement that has been running for three days, those three days count. SPL Cloud shows you the exact amount before activation.

Deactivating Pro

With Deactivate Pro on the measurement or Deactivate Pro for the job on the job:

• The Pro features are locked immediately. Shared links stop working, alarms are no longer evaluated.
• Amounts already accrued are billed with the next invoice. There is no refund.
• Further measuring days are no longer counted. The measurement continues recording normally.
• Measurements that were activated directly stay active when you deactivate Pro for the job.

Activating again

If you activate Pro again later, the measuring year continues seamlessly as if there had been no break. Measuring days from the break are counted retroactively. There is no test hour anymore; billing starts immediately. Switching off and on repeatedly therefore saves nothing.

Billing

Billing happens once a month, on the last day of the calendar month, for all measuring days accrued in that month. The stored payment method is charged automatically.

If the charge fails, the payment service retries several times. If payment fails definitively, the Pro features of the affected measurements are locked until the payment is settled.

Keeping an eye on costs

• Accrued costs in the payment settings: all Pro measurements with their costs in the current year.
• License details of a measurement (via View details at Pro): measuring year, billable measuring days, progress towards the cap, amounts already billed, billing history and all measuring days with their recorded time.
• License details of a job: total across all its measurements.

Only people who may manage the job or measurement see the costs.

2 - Shared links

With a shared link, anyone who has the link sees a measurement or a whole job, without an SPL Cloud account. Typical for organizers, operators and authorities, or as a QR code in a festival’s production office.

For people with an account, there is the free read access.

Prerequisite

• Link to a measurement: the measurement needs Pro.
• Link to a job: the job needs Pro (Activate Pro for the job). Pro on individual measurements of the job is not enough for this.

Creating a link

1. Menu Measurement or Job › Manage Read Access.
2. Under Read Access Links: Add Access Link.
3. Select scope: this measurement or the whole job.
4. Expiration: the date from which the link stops working. Leave empty if it should not expire. We recommend a date about ten days after the event.
5. Save.

You then see the link and the QR code. Copy copies the link, for example for an email. You can print the QR code.

What recipients see

Recipients open the link in the browser and see the measurement or job with all data, days, events and pictures. They can download day reports and CSV exports. They cannot change anything and only see what the link shares.

Revoking a link

Manage Read Access lists all links with their expiration. Remove invalidates a link immediately.

When Pro ends

If Pro is deactivated or payment fails, the links stop working. Recipients then see This shared link is currently not available. The links remain stored and work again as soon as Pro is active again.

3 - Reports and pictures

Day reports

In SPL Sense, the day report as PDF is free. In SPL Cloud it is available with Pro, in two variants:

• Day report: PDF button at the selected day. Without Pro, the button is greyed out.
• Day report with deviations: menu Measurement › Open day report with deviations. Additionally contains the exceedances of the value profile thresholds for the selected day.

If the measurement belongs to an organization with a logo, the logo appears in the report. You set the logo on the organization page.

Pictures for the measurement

Pictures document how the measurement was made: the measuring location, the sensor, the sound system, the record of the calibration run.

1. Open the measurement. On the side is the Pictures area.
2. Drag photos into the area or click +.
3. Clicking a picture opens it large. There you add a Caption and Save.

Anyone who sees the measurement sees the pictures, also via read access and shared links. Only people who may manage the measurement can add pictures, and only with Pro. Deleting (Delete picture?) removes the picture permanently.

Pictures report

Menu Measurement › Open pictures report creates a PDF with all pictures of the measurement and their captions. Together with the day report, this gives complete documentation of the measurement.

4 - Alarms

SPL Cloud checks the running Pro measurements every minute and notifies the registered recipients:

• Exceedance: a value is above a threshold of the measurement’s value profile.
• Downtime: a running measurement stops sending data, for example because power or internet is gone.

Alarms only run for measurements with Pro. Other measurements in the same scope are skipped.

Where to set up alarms

• For a whole job: menu Job › Alarms. The setting applies to all its measurements.
• For a single measurement: menu Measurement › Alarm configuration. For an independent measurement, this is the only way. If the measurement belongs to a job, this setting overrides the job’s setting for this one measurement.

At the top of the page you choose the scope: Full Job or Single Measurement. The list below shows the affected measurements and points out measurements without Pro or without limits.

Settings

First switch on Enable alarms for this scope.

Exceedance

• Trigger at severity: which thresholds of the value profile trigger an alarm: Notification, Warning, Limit. The thresholds themselves come from each measurement’s value profile. Without thresholds in the value profile, there are no exceedance alarms.
• Sustained for: the number of minutes the value must stay above the threshold before an alarm is triggered. This filters out short peaks. Default: 15 minutes; 5 to 15 minutes are common.

Downtime

• Silence before alarm: the number of minutes data may be missing before a downtime alarm is triggered. Default: 30 minutes. Devices on mobile networks often upload in bursts; don’t choose too short a time for them.

End of an alarm

Also notify when an alarm clears: a second message as soon as the level is normal again or data arrives again. Off by default, because it roughly doubles the number of messages. Leave it off if recipients get SMS.

Recipients

Recipients don’t need an SPL Cloud account. With Add recipient you enter per person:

• Email and/or Phone. SMS needs a phone number. The national format also works (079 …); it is converted to the international format.
• Receives: All alarms, Downtime only or Limit alarms only. Whoever brings a device back online rarely needs exceedances, and whoever monitors levels rarely needs downtime alarms.

It’s quicker with Add me and Add organization members: name, email and, if stored in the profile, the phone number are taken over.

When notifications are sent

• Exceedance: when the first severity is reached and again at every change of severity (for example from Warning to Limit or back). As long as the severity stays the same, no further message is sent.
• Downtime: once, when the downtime is detected.
• Several alarms in the same minute are combined into one message.
• The message contains a link to the measurement or job in SPL Cloud.

5 - Remote control and comments

With remote control, you operate SPL Sense from SPL Cloud, for example a Raspberry Pi in a rack or a laptop at another stage.

Prerequisites

• Allowed in SPL Sense: Settings › Cloud › Allow remote control. Off by default. This way the person on site always decides whether their instance may be remote controlled.
• Instance online: commands only go to a connected instance. There is no queue.
• Pro on the measurement: only measurements with Pro can be controlled.
• Permission: the owner of the instance; for an instance of an organization, all members. People with read access or a shared link can never control.
• SPL Sense version 2.0 or later.

What is possible

On the instance or measurement page, in the Remote control area:

Measurements on the instance shows all measurements of SPL Sense, including those without cloud uplink. Only measurements that are in the cloud and have Pro can be controlled.

What is not possible

• Calibration and software updates
• Measuring the line offset (needs noise and silence on site)
• Setting up the leveler connection
• Editing custom limits in the value profile; this is only possible on the instance

Confirmation and feedback

Every command that changes something asks first, with measurement and instance in the text, for example “Stop measurement ‘Main stage’ on ‘Laptop-FOH’?”.

After that, the cloud reports the result. If the instance doesn’t answer in time, the message says that the command may have been executed anyway; check the state of the instance in that case.

In SPL Sense, every command from the cloud appears as a message, and the measurement’s events show who triggered it (remotely by …).

If people on site and in the cloud change something at the same time, the last change wins.

Comments and excluded time ranges

With Pro, you can also add comments and exclude time ranges in the cloud in the Events area, just as in SPL Sense. This also goes via remote control: the instance must be online and allow remote control.