Leif

Hi Sparky!

These are EXCELLENT suggestions!

30 Hz sine test tone and 30 Hz burst mode (30hz sine for 0.5 seconds, silence 0.5 seconds, 30hz size inverted for 0.5 seconds, silence 0.5 seconds) will be excellent additions.

Left/Right is certainly possible, but complicates things a bit for composite output. Should the composite output just stick to mono perhaps, as I would otherwise have to run the test tones where this is applicable through the stereo encoder.

Noise generator is also valid, but complicated in practice:

I could use the clipper algorithm to generate extremely compact band limited white noise, it would stay perfectly within +/- 75 kHz deviation and within the allotted frequency band. The complicating factor is that this assumes mono transmission. An FM stereo channel can potentially use an extreme amount of bandwidth (imagine a 57000hz tone at +/- 75 kHz deviation — not a common usage scenario, but still). Some countries (The Netherlands for example) use spectrum mask standards (ITU-R SM.1268-1 for example) to enforce the amount of bandwidth a given station is allowed to occupy. But, I digress. 16 kHz white noise may not be adequate — would we need 0 – 54 kHz white noise, or perhaps 16 kHz noise into the stereo decoder?

There’s no room to add the frequency band information in the gui, but I could add it to the tooltips. Would that work?

All of the above, I’m willing to add to the current $199 BBP, provided I can wrap my head around some of the things.

Dayparting is something I’m already planning for the more advanced future versions of Breakaway Broadcast, but you have an EXCELLENT idea. Imagine a "Save Preset as WAV" option, and all you have to do to recall that preset is to play the resulting 1-second wave file. Naturally, it would have to use some kind of audio encoding scheme to survive mixers and whatnot, but I figure, if C64 programs could survive on cassette tape, why should BBP be any worse? 🙂 Holy 1984, Batman, but I like it!

More than a few people have told me I’m insane for releasing an algorithm of this caliber for $199, but I keep answering — just wait for the more advanced versions, there’s no shortage of useful features that can be added to make the more expensive versions worth buying. I’ve set the bar high for myself, but not unrealistically so, and I do like a good challenge 🙂.

Best regards,
///Leif

Philip,

I think I understand now.. That’s a very strange problem! I’ll ask the Virtual Audio Cable guy whether he’s ever heard of anything like it — it definitely shouldn’t be happening.

Regarding the meters though, they *are* logarithmic! I promise! 🙂

Here’s an example of a linear meter:

If you look closely (and with a bit of imagination / interpolation), you’ll see that -6 to 0dB on the scale uses twice as much space as -12 to -6, which again uses twice as much space as -18 to -12. This means the meter responds to voltage in a linear fashion, because as you may know, to gain 6dB you must double the voltage.

The meters in Breakaway are completely logarithmic. The standard unit to measure audio level logarithmically is the decibel, and as you can see, the dB units are evenly spaced across the entire length on the meter, thus following dB’s, which are a logaritmic unit.

Linear (non-logarithmic) meters such as the one above tend to be misleading, because -20 looks like it’s basically no level at all, even though -20dB is still 12 bits out of 16 in use!

It’s especially dangerous to use linear meters if working with compressors, since the meter will exaggerate the tiny amount of dynamics remaining in the signal when you get close to 0dB, thus easily causing the operator to crank things too far, if going by the meter without really listening. Far too many people operate in this manner, as is evident by the atrociousness that passes for CD Quality nowadays! 🙂

Anyway.. Did this clear things up? 🙂

///Leif

Howdy!

Carl, it’s true that some preset changes and bypass/unbypass causes a click. The Bypass/Un-bypass click is a performance tradeoff — when you bypass, it really shuts down the core and stops processing, and clears the look-ahead buffers inside the core, thus there’s a moment of silence when you un-bypass. The preset change causes a click when going from for example a 6-band to a 7-band preset, but not between two 6-band presets. I never saw it as a problem since it’s not really something one does all the time — I figured it was worth it for the lower CPU usage.

I think I know what’s going on on your dual-monitor system. I use dual-monitor myself for developing, so Breakaway does support it.
When you’ve minimized the window, how it comes back depends on how you bring it back. If you bring it back by clicking on the Breakaway window button on the taskbar, it comes back right where you left it. If you bring it back by double-clicking on the icon in the tray, you’re executing the "Find Window" function, which makes sure that the main window is visible. How I intended for it to work is, imagine that you’ve dragged the breakaway window 99% outside of the screen.. Let’s say you drag it by an inside corner (not resizing) and pull most of the window outside the screen. No amount of clicking on the taskbar button will make it visible, cause you’ll only see a corner, but double-clicking on the tray icon makes it fully visible.

There is indeed an imposed window size limit — it’s 2560 pixels, and it comes from the oscilloscope. If the window is made larger than that, there aren’t enough pixels in the audio waveform, and you start seeing gaps. Yes, it would be possible to write an oscilloscope that interpolates the data, but come on 🙂.. My goal was an oscilloscope with subpixel precision rendering, anti-aliasing, digital phosphor emulation, proper auto-triggering for music, and phosphor persistence — and it had to be FAST enough to work on any computer without people feeling it’s wasting CPU power. As such, I succeeded, and it’s pretty much alone in its class. Making the window infinitely wide didn’t make the list, sorry 🙂. I made sure it can be maximized on the largest displays available (30 inch LCDs), which are indeed exactly 2560 pixels wide.

I suppose I could write code so that the oscilloscopes are displayed side by side if the window is made that large, but… I think we’d better draw the line somewhere 😉.

KC4RAE, I’m not sure I understand — what do you mean by linear scales for the input or output signals? Do you mean the VU meters?

The muting, now that sounds like a real problem. Can you explain more exactly what happens, and how to reproduce it? I’ve never seen it happen.

Hydro, I don’t see a problem in having the windows volume sliders cranked, in fact I personally always turn the windows sound card output slider all the way up and use the Breakaway control instead, since it’s so much more easily accessible and more accurate to adjust. Even if the sound card’s volume range is too high, and allows distortion at the highest levels, turning Breakaway’s volume down will avoid it. Breakaway uses a very high quality noise-shaped dithering algorithm to maintain quality even at very low levels, so it shouldn’t cause any problems.

Thank you, All, for your feedback! 🙂

Best regards,
///Leif

Remember, Breakaway Personal is a consumer product. It happens to have reference quality processing inside, but it’s still a consumer product 🙂.

I’d like to do a true full featured professional version at some point. It’ll take some research to find out what a reasonable price would be. From my point of view, the price of software doesn’t need to be any higher than the per-unit royalty i would get from a manufacturer building a hardware version, so it will still be much less expensive than the hardware units, even when you include buying a dedicated rackmount PC to run it on.

///Leif