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Appreciate the reply Jesse. We've tried that approach, and I was hoping to simplify things by having a BAone 'point to point' solution without also requiring a Icecast server on the pc to stream to just one client. i.e. The Opticodecs have a mode that would serve one stream direct to one player. Perhaps in a future update 🙂
Do you have a I5/I7 Sandy bridge Intel processor? There are documented issues involving PCI sound cards, which may be your problem.
Jesse – WinXPPro SP2 uptime, I believe it was around 18 months at one site, and if I recall correctly we were using ASIO drivers. It is possible the pc was rebboted withough my knowledge, but I didn’t think so. I guess this is something to watch out for with BBP then. Do you know if Win7 has this issue? Is Wine on Linux a more stable long term option?
Re MPX clipping hardware. I realise I’m commenting here on an unknown business model, so please just take this as airing ideas. From what you describe about the need for a custom audio card to support the new MPX clipping, then perhaps an alternative idea is to forget the dongle and just release a custom PCI BBP-PRO sound card! If the BBP-PRO audio card/s are not in the pc then installed BBP software won’t run in full BBP-PRO mode. That should fully get around the piracy problem!
Orban do exactly that for the 1010PE streaming encoding software which won’t run unless you also have an Orban 1100 PCI audio processing card (which has its own unique hardware ID) in the same pc.
I can think of a couple of our sites where we could consider a custom card, but never have been able to justify buying and importing any turnkey dedicated processing box, even low end ones. This suggests with other "middle ground" users in the same situation, it would open up the market and increase unit sales, perhaps allowing Leif to lower the price for a similar profit margin per card compared to a dedicated box solution that moves less units. As the end user, we would benefit from both lower hardware costs and lower software compared to a dedicated box. I’d really like to get this to as many listeners/sites as I can justify.
Leif could perhaps still offer a turnkey box option with 24/7 support for those larger broadcasters who want a "plug & play" solution with solid support.
So three tiers, something like;
– BBP sofware only,forum support. (entry level)
– BBP MPX clipping sound card, intermediate software control, forum & email support (mid level)
– BBP dedicated MPX clipping hardware plug & play box, advanced software control, 24/7 support (high level)I realise you may not be able to comment on this Leif, but food for thought. And Jesse, your right, it is definitely an art! Aaron – Australia.
Thanks everyone for your replies so far. In my original post I meant to refer to Orban 8400/8500, not Orban 8500/8600 (not sure many have heard the 8600 yet!).
Re enabling the stereo enhancer, that didn’t work for me – on two pc’s I tried (0.90.77). But I’ve got it running fine now after installing 0.90.93. Thanks for the suggestion and info on the separate MPX on L/R output configuration in this version. Yorkie , I also hope that separate AGC drive is on the way!
re split processing on the AAC+ link, after looking at the issue further, I understand it may also be desirable to set the processing at the studio to include the AGC & MBL compression stages only (and perhaps light peak protection limiting, but no clipping), while the tx end will have the limiting & clipping sections. The theory is that if tonal rebalancing of the MBL section occurs only at the transmitter end, that it may uncover some of link noise previously masked by the link codec. In this case, it may only be possible to use BBP (at both ends of the link) if we have more advanced control, or at least the ability to disable some processing modules.
Re the pc, I’d certainly be looking at a new Intel based pc with SS-HD. Jesse, we are using WinXP Pro stripped back to a bare minimum for Sonos/MBL, running on entry level Dell pc’s, not internet connected, on UPS’s, and rarely touched. Never had a problem at multiple sites for years. (the general office XP pc’s here are a different story…).
re stealing software – I couldn’t agree more with you. This is brilliant, great value software. Even putting morals aside, it doesn’t make any sense to try and undermine Leif’s outstanding effort to provide BBP at this price point. It would be a great pity if just a couple of people ruined it for the majority who are quite willing, and would prefer, to do the right thing.
I respect Leif’s aim to get hardware boxes on the market and I know nothing of how important that may be to his business model, but it is a pity that pc’s can’t still be the order of the day. While I don’t know the cost of manufacturing, supporting and internationally shipping dedicated hardware, I can only guess it will be higher than locally buying a pc with a SS-HD and sticking a Juli@ card in it. Is it not possible to perhaps have a USB dongle based security system to prevent this problem? It seems to work for the guys who make our Music Schedular (Aware Music master). They just send us a dongle from the US in the mail. If it could be done that way for BBP, then we get the advantage of low cost hardware, leaving more money spare to provide Leif for the software with those pioneering MPX’s clippers! It also allows USB keys to be moved to another pc quickly in the event of an emergency – something you can’t do with dedicated hardware boxes! It’s also likely you will shift more product that way, if the hardware costs can be contained to a pc & USB security dongle. Just a thought!
Aaron
