Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Hi Sparky!
Thank you for your comments 🙂. Yes – it was a royal pain in the neck, took forever, and I’m still exhausted from it. One of these days though I’ll get productive again 😉.
The Radio Magic preset is very over the top in every way, in my humble opinion, but throttling back Speed does indeed open it up a lot.
What do you mean by "designed for voice"? Do you mean, feed dry unprocessed microphone voice through (as acquired by a high quality sound card and a high quality mic) and process similar to what a Symetrix 528 or a DBX 286A would do?
Or, do you mean something to listen to books-on-cd with, which have most likely already been pre-processed by something like the above described units?
Emulating a processor designed for AM or FM is impossible with Breakaway because it does not do pre-emphasis limiting. Doing that would only degrade the sound for the applications it’s intended for. I have however written an FM processor as well, and emulating the processor you mentioned would be holding it back 😉.
Thailand is a nice place indeed. I like it a lot – I feel like I can be myself much more than I could even in my home country (Sweden), let alone the U.S.! The language is challenge but doable, and it’s been a lot of fun learning. Phuket is way down south – I’m way up north (far away from the tourist trails). Quite different up here, even more enjoyable if you ask me 🙂.
?????? 🙂
///Leif
Aw, come on, Jesse 🙂.
I’ll take 192kbps MP3 -> Soundblaster Live Analog Output -> Aeromax HDFM
over
FLAC -> Digital Output -> Optimod 8500
..any day of the week.
///Leif
Howdy!
Oh, it’s FM. In that case Breakaway as it is won’t do you much good – however Aeromax-HDFM (in whatever form it finally gets released in) will, and it will make you the best sounding station in town. Will be out this year 🙂.
///Leif
When you buy a new computer, send us an email with your new hardware ID, we’ll happily issue a new unlock code.
///Leif
Hi James! LOL, Hej på dig 😉.
Skin support will be here one day, but I’ve got a long Breakaway-related to-do list with many really critical things on it, so it might take a long time.
///Leif
Greetings from Isaan, Thailand! 🙂
Judging from how you described your setup, I believe your best bet is to wait for the Webcaster version.
The webcaster version will allow you to just process live audio (in through the sound card, process, and out through the sound card) with low latency. This way you’ll be able to use a single (cheap) computer to take the place of the hardware. No need to worry about licensing for all the DJs computers.
The webcaster version will be a couple of months at least, but it’ll come.
///Leif
Howdy!
I’m glad you found it — excellent!
However.. How the heck did they (=the guys who made JetAudio) accomplish that?
I’m gonna have to try that for myself and see what’s going on 🙂
///Leif
Hi Angel!
You know, the hardest type of bug to fix, is the kind that the engineer can’t reproduce.
It worked perfectly for me on the first try.
I started with a fresh install of XP SP2, installed Jet Audio first, and then installed Breakaway.
Worked beautifully. I then looked in the JetAudio options to see if there was anywhere to select what sound card to use, and couldn’t find anything — it seems to only use the windows default audio device.. which means I have no clue what could be going wrong — it should just work! JetAudio interfaces with the operating system like any other player — no reason it shouldn’t just work, like it did when I tried it.
Does anyone else have any ideas?
///Leif
Hi Lane!
No worries. Nothing wrong with having preferences — I sure have a few myself!
A low powered PC would probably work just fine for Breakaway.
A friend and I just opened a karaoke restaurant here in Thailand. I finally got my own audio solution going today!
The PC is a Celeron 420 (1.6 GHz) with an Edirol FA-101 firewire audio interface (8 channels in and out, including two mic preamps). The lowly computer is running is a custom program I call AsioKaraoke:
One Breakaway Stereo core for the music
Two Breakaway Mono Cores – one for each microphone
One Breakaway Speaker Compensation core with up to 5.1 support, 8 parametric EQs for each speaker, Pink noise generator, Adjustable Crossovers (and subwoofer output) as well as a volume dependent Loudness control with four adjustable parametric EQs (common for all speakers).It also supports calling Winamp plug-ins, and it’s currently calling the dsp_vst wrapper (I admit, I was too lazy to write VST support myself for this — it’s non-trivial) which is in turn calling a VST reverb plug-in, for the microphones.
All of the above is using 35% on that celeron. Without the reverb, it uses roughly 15-20%, and that includes the breakaway cores and all the parametric EQs.
Indeed, the PC wasn’t free – it was $300 including a 17" CRT, and the Edirol FA-101 was another $380.. But, it would have been very expensive to match this functionality in hardware, and it works like a charm 🙂.
Please note, this is *not* a product — just something I hacked together. Just an example though of one way to solve the audio problem 🙂.
(Before I did this, guests were actually complaining that it was either too quiet or too loud, had to adjust the volume on the darn karaoke machine all the time. Also, the sound just wasn’t particularly good, particularly not the mic sound. Multiband Compression can do wonders, and so can Parametric EQ in combination with a pink noise generator, a calibrated measurement microphone, and spectrum analyzers 🙂.
I’d be very interested to see how much Breakaway used on a very low power motherboard though. It should definitely be able to run what I described above, minus the reverb.
Oh man I love audio and computers 😉
///Leif
Footnote: Computer runs XP Professional. Was gonna run Windows 2000 (much cleaner), had it all installed and ready, and then noticed that the Edirol FA-101 drivers don’t support it.. Ah well, XP runs fine. Now all I need is a 10-key keypad, MPEG-1 (VCD) playback support, and a USB Coin Acceptor, and we’ll REALLY be in business.
Hi Zee100!
The hardware ID is *supposedly* static between windows installs on the same machine.
However, I know of at least one case where that wasn’t true.
If you ever have problems, just e-mail us with the new hardware ID and we’ll make you a new key.
///Leif
I haven’t tested it, but I believe it should probably work fine, since the OS must be based on XP, 2003 or Vista, which all run Breakaway just fine.
However, isn’t listening to music *at* the Home Server PC sort of pointless? Wouldn’t you want to listen on one of the OTHER PCs on your network, like the one you’re actually working at?
Hi Lane!
The nice thing about PCs is that once you know how to write reasonably optimized algorithms, they’re *incredibly* powerful. A modern average PC, let’s say a Core 2 Duo, can do a truly staggering amount of audio processing.
If you consider that Breakaway without the GUI uses barely 5% on such a machine.. Imagine what you could do if you dedicated the whole machine to audio processing. For a phat analogy, i’d say it’s like cutting butter with a software modulated laser. 😉
The other nice thing about PCs is speed of development. After changing something in the algorithm, I can recompile an be listening to an updated version in literally 10 seconds flat. This helps tremendously since audio development is an iterative process – if I had to develop the way Orban does (where an algorithm change-write code-compile-flash-listen change takes at least a day), Breakaway would still be in the lab, and I would be pulling my hair out! 🙂
I don’t have an ASIO version planned yet, but the Mac version will be out some time this year. 🙂
///Leif
Howdy!
I’m afraid I have bad news – the current version actually only supports Stereo. There’s no way to use it with more than 2 channels.
The Breakaway core algorithm itself supports up to 7.1, so when I come up with a user friendly way to support this, I’ll implement it. 🙂
///Leif
You’re absolutely right, Jesse! The correct location for headphones is in on the head (covering both ears, and when they’re used in that manner, you get very close to 100% stereo separation.
Spatial enhancers simulate a widening of the stereo field by gradually adjusting the speakers to be *out of phase*, so that there is some cancellation in the middle. This way, you can get more stereo separation than you otherwise would, but nowhere near 100%.
With headphones, you’re already at 100%, so spatial enhancement doesn’t apply. In fact, in headphones, for certain applications it’s useful to use room / speaker simulation, to DECREASE stereo separation. Dolby Headphone is an algorithm that does this, and it’s pretty convincing — I just wish it sounded better.
///Leif
Touché 🙂.
Yes, both.
I initially moved to the states to work for Orban. Stayed there for only 3 months – a coworker suggested we start our own company around my inventions, and Octiv was born. Then Octiv got bought out by PLT, renamed Volume Logic Group, I left, and VLG was shut down. <– strongly abridged version
As for Omnia, they’re in the process of acquiring Linear Acoustic (public information since NAB *last* year), and Linear Acoustic is my biggest client, so I will definitely be seeing a lot of Frank Foti in the future when I visit the states 🙂.
///Leif
