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Gnarvster, I have no clue!
Does this happen even if Breakaway isn’t running?
I wonder if there’s a program loaded on your system that is interfering with the default sound device selection.
It might be worth disabling all the things loaded on your startup and see if you can narrow down which one it is. I personally use a program called "Codestuff Starter" to oversee and easily enable/disable things from loading at startup.
Hydro, I do have a clue, and it’s not related to Pandora at all.
Breakaway, when started at windows startup, starts in "do not complain" mode. If it fails to open the output sound card (for example due to a windows startup sound already playing), it doesn’t tell you — it just keeps on trying.
In this state, you’ll see the audio coming into the input oscilloscope, but not coming out of the output scope.
It should start working by itself (it retries every few seconds) – I’m not sure why it doesn’t do it properly on your system.
Going into the Settings *completely* restarts the audio engine – good thing at least this works.
If you want to try to narrow down the problem (and you’re comfortable using RegEdit), open regedit and navigate to the key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun…and look at the Breakaway string value. You’ll note the command line parameter "force". If you remove this, the next time you start your computer, if Breakaway can’t open the sound card on the first try, it will give you an error message. This message might be a clue to track down what’s going on.
///Leif
///Leif
Hi Tino!
The Breakaway core algorithm itself is very quick – it only delays a couple of milliseconds.
If you run Breakaway Personal (the version available for download here) on a clean XP system, you can likely use Tiny buffering, which will likely be fast enough to monitor yourself in headphones.
However – Breakaway is not an FM limiter. It does not even pretend to do pre-emphasis or absolute analog peak control. You could use it if you add on other peak limiting, but then you’re back to square one — latency problem.
Aeromax-HDFM, which will be released this year, uses the Breakaway core and a new state of the art FM back-end, which will make you the cleanest station on the dial while keeping pace with the ones with traditional processors cranked to 11.
However, Aeromax-HDFM throughput delay, MINIMUM, is a whopping half a second. Up to several seconds if you enable several features. So, monitoring off-air is right out, but it does have a low latency output with only Breakaway core processing (no FM limiting) which is perfect for DJ monitoring.
So, the answer to all three questions is YES, but not yet, and not with the $29.95 Breakaway Personal version.
It’s for listening to music played from your computer, nothing more, nothing less.
///Leif
Hi Ashen!
The explanation is that I’ve never had a laptop with a wheel-style volume control to test with – I’ve tested only with buttons. I implemented an acceleration feature which makes a volume change start out slowly, but as you hold the button down it speeds up.
The problem, of course, is that your computer has a volume knob, which likely emulates the normal Volume Up/Volume Down button presses, without any way of "holding a button down".
Darn. This one truly never crossed my mind. There’s no way to circumvent Breakaway’s behaviour currently, but I’ll implement a workaround for the next release.
Ashen, would you be willing to do some alpha testing so I make sure I get it solved properly for you?
///Leif
Howdy!
I’ll be happy to try to help.
When you say Breakaway cuts the sound, do you still see the incoming audio on the Breakaway Oscilloscope or meters, or does it go completely dead?
Also, one thing to try, to narrow down the problem:
Start Windows Media Player, start a very long song (Stairway to Heaven?)
While leaving WMP playing, start jazler, cue up two short songs and play.
After the first song in jazler finished, and breakaway cuts the sound, does breakaway cut the sound of BOTH jazler and WMP, or does WMP keep playing while jazler goes silent?
///Leif
Hi Mehcore!
I’m in the same situation as you – I just "upgraded" to Vista 64 (Home Premium) and just when I thought I had got most everything working the way it was supposed to, the bomb dropped – my development environment (Visual C++ 6) doesn’t work properly in Vista, and I’m not sure what to do yet. Dual-boot would be a huge hassle, but I might not have a choice.
The hardware ID, in theory, should be the same in both OS’es.
Try it, let me know what you get.
///Leif
Hi Hydro,
We do have some redundancy implemented. ClaessonEdwards is Leif Claesson (me) and Keith Edwards. Geographical independencee – he’s in California, I’m in Thailand. So, as long as we don’t get hit by BOTH an Earthquake and a Tsunami, we should be fine. Neither of us are into gambling, although I do go to vegas every year for the NAB convention (National Association of Broadcasters). 🙂
Changing your sound card, video card or hard drive is not supposed to invalidate your serial number. The hardware ID is based on CPU type and Bios serial number – that’s all.
However, I didn’t write the protection code myself – I licensed it, so I can’t know for sure. The safeguard is that we’re generous with new activations – we’re human, and don’t always trust computers. 🙂
///Leif
Hi!
Thank you – I’m honoured 😉.
I know where you’re coming from. Yes, the Hardware ID is similar to Windows Activation, and indeed, if you upgrade your computer enough that the hardware ID changes, it will need a new activation.
However, we make it easy. Customer satisfaction is #1 on our list – so when you’ve upgraded, all you have to do is shoot us an e-mail with the new Hardware ID and we’ll just give you a new activation code. This is unlimited (in the same sense that broadband internet is) – so no worries.
At end-of-life for the product, we’ll likely make an unlocked version available to previous customers.
///Leif
Hydro,
There is no such thing as voiding / recalling a Breakaway key. So basically, we take your word for it, and when you ask for a new key, we give you another one.
Of course, if you were to do this way too often, we would end up having to tell you to go buy DFX instead. 🙂
///Leif
Excellent (and correct) answer, Jesse.
Alternative answer:
Because the graphics in Breakaway limit themselves to roughly 90% of CPU usage, so that it doesn’t stall your computer. It should never reach 100% no matter how large you make the window.
Benny’s computer might be a few years old, in combination with a high resolution screen.
On my 2GHz Pentium-M Laptop with 1440×1050 screen, Breakaway can use 90% if you maximize the window.
However, on the machine I developed Breakaway on (Core 2 Duo E6430 and nVidia 7600 GT) full screen never used above 15%, and with the main window closed, the audio engine used well under 5%.
///Leif
Hi Calle!
It’s basically random.
I specifically wrote support for Sleep / Hibernation into Breakaway, and it works by does this by shutting down the audio engine before hibernating, and re-starting it after hibernating.
The problem is (as far as I understand it), I severely underestimated how long it may take for an average system to resume from Hibernation and become responsive again. Thus, a part of Breakaway’s audio engine times out, and things go downhill from there. I’m working on a robust solution.
///Leif
Hi Dj Buik!
The one big setup issue I can think of, is that the standard version of Breakaway can only receive sound from the Breakaway Pipeline, and can only play to a real sound card, not a virtual device. So, to feed the audio to Airomate you would need two sound cards, and pipe the audio back into the computer with a cable.
The webcaster version will not have this limitation, it will be able to use any device – real or virtual, and will be able to do what you ask.
For the current version, if you want to process the audio from a single version, you could download the Virtual Audio Cable demo (google) and use the free Audio Repeater utility that comes with that, to feed audio from the sound card input to the Breakaway Pipeline.
This adds latency, but it does work.
///Leif
Hi Calle!
This is a known bug which seems to affect certain systems. I’m working on a solution, but in the meantime, here’s a workaround:
Go into the Breakaway Settings (right-click the Main Window and choose Settings) and uncheck "Audio Realtime Priority".
This will keep breakaway as a single process instead of two, and is much less likely to cause problems on sleep / hibernate.
Please let me know if this workaround works for you 🙂.
///Leif
Hi Johnny!
I believe this should work fine. Licensing is per-computer, so you can make as many copies as you like on that one computer.
You should be able to just install a second copy in a different folder. I haven’t tested this, but have no reason to believe it wouldn’t work. 😉
///Leif
I don’t know, Knightrider – after spending top dollar for a Digigram VXPocket PCMCIA card several years back, and never really had it work properly (drivers were outrageously horrendous), I’m not so sure I want to touch anything with their name.
To be honest, my old trusty SB Audigy2 ZS Notebook has worked much much better — for outputting composite (192khz). I checked it with both an analog Tektronix Scope and a Belar Wizard – as long as you compensate for tilt (which you have to do with most any DAC) it’s pristine as far as FM MPX is concerned.
Now, the ADC is a different story. It can’t do 192khz to begin with, so I would definitely not use it for composite, no 🙂.
///Leif
Hi Dj Buik!
Setup issues aside, algorithmically, it can’t be done:
Airomate does not have a properly functioning peak-limiting back-end for FM. It has a clipper, and a low pass filter, but no matter how you set it up, you will have a lot of distortion *and* a lot of overshoots. The overshoots mean you have to turn your modulation way down, so you will not only sound distorted but also quiet.
The one way to use Airomate is to feed it a signal that has already been perfectly peak limited (the pre-emph L/R output of an Orban processor will do this just fine, but Omnia will not), turn off the filtering and clipping of Airomate, and use it only as a stereo generator + rds generator. This works, and gives you an acceptable overshoot-free signal, but defeats the purpose — if you can afford an Orban, you might as well just use the built-in stereo generator.
Please note that other common free solutions like Sould Solution and Sonos will have the exact same problem – they do peak clipping, but have an insane amount of overshoots, and they’re neither oversampled nor distortion cancelled.
It’s possible that I’ll be releasing software to take care of all this, this year. I can’t guarantee it, but it’s possible. It’s written already – it’s a matter of finding the best way to sell it.
///Leif
