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Thanks for the heads-up luke!
I don’t use SSDs in my workstations yet. I use UFDs on utility machines, and just plain hard drives in workstations for temporary storage, and anything non-temporary goes in my server, which has two Raid-5 arrays.
http://leif.cx/photos/latest-projects/s … binet-new/
///Leif
Yes! I have added this feature to Breakaway Live already, so Breakaway Personal is not far behind.
///Leif
Hi Luke,
You don’t actually lose free space. That’s impossible — there’s no way the hardware (low-level) can go in and modify the file system (higher level). There’s actually sectors reserved for this purpose, above and beyond the advertised capacity! I have no idea what percentage we’re talking about, but hard drives do the exact same thing. They have a bunch of space reserved, which they will start using to reallocate bad sectors.
XP embedded is real nice, because once you’ve made the image, you don’t need to install it, you just run. Sure, the FBA (First Boot Agent) runs, but that doesn’t take very long, and it’s unattended.
One of these days I will make a video of one of my systems booting, where I have changed the bios logo, windows startup screen etc to my own custom logo, making it look a lot less like a computer and a lot more like hardware. 🙂
///Leif
The trial version never mutes audio — it just bypasses after half an hour, but in bypass it still passes audio.
There’s a watchdog inside the audio engine, and if audio stops passing through, breakaway reopens the driver automatically, in the background! What you’re describing *should* never happen, but obviously it is. Have you tried using a different (newer) driver for your sound card?
What sound card (or what on-board audio chip) are you running?
Best,
///LeifImplementing it into Breakaway Live is a definite possibility. In fact, all I’d have to do would be to add a software mixer to the 2, 3 and 4 instance versions, so that you could get all the processed inputs out through the primary output, which has the speaker eq section. I would then make a simple Mixer API available so that you could for example control microphone on/off from another program running on the same machine, just like i’m doing with the AsioKaraoke prototype app.
Interesting idea, and not too difficult. I might just do that, and switch to running BreakawayLive myself. 🙂
///Leif
I had a furniture carpenter custom make the cabinet. I told him what needed to go in and where, but gave him pretty much free hands in designing it. Came out nice I think, very different from western style 😉. Total cost of the finished cabinet including wood, speaker cabinet and carpenter’s fee: $600. Gotta love Thailand 😉.
quote :Now for karaoke, you’d need to do some mic processing!Indeed — and I am 🙂. Three breakaway cores. One for music, one for mic 1, one for mic 2, and nothing on the mixdown! (tried it — didn’t sound good).
Not BBP though, it’s a special Breakaway development build I call AsioKaraoke (not very imaginative).AsioKaraoke doesn’t have much of a gui (just standard black-on-grey windows dialog), but it’s never shown on the screen, the song selector interface is fullscreen.
So how’s the audio?
Fine, thanks 🙂. Turned out 12 bands of PEQ was not enough to completely flatten the speakers, so thanks to that, Breakaway Live release is getting delayed a little while I put more PEQ bands in. I figured, others will need it, and it didn’t make sense to make it an upsell feature, because it’s cheap crappy speakers that need more EQ, and the one who buys cheap crappy speakers wouldn’t buy the upsell version anyway. Might as well throw it in.
With proper EQ’ing though (ended up using about 20 bands of PEQ!), it sounds freaking awesome. Crystal clear, basically reference quality. The woofer box is 420 liters, ports tuned to 45hz, and plays down to 35 or so before it drops below usable range.
The tweeters are mounted really high up, so that they’re not causing ear damage to whoever is standing in front of the jukebox selecting songs. Because of that, the audio is not very good if you stand right in front of it, because of the big distance separation between tweeters and woofers.. However, stand 3 meters away, and the sound from the woofers and tweeters meld together to form a coherent image, with surprisingly good stereo separation considering the near proximity of the left and right channels. Perhaps I should write that stereo enhancer and see what happens 🙂.
So, why did I build a jukebox?
Well, just for fun really. A guy’s gotta have some fun right? 🙂 Really, I don’t need the business, I have my hands completely full with everything else, but it’s fun to do something locally — all my other business is overseas, and karaoke is extremely popular in Asia as you may know. For anything that involves good sound, count me in 🙂. So, I’m not selling this jukebox, will just keep it at home as a showroom example.
Inside the jukebox is a 2x200w (RMS) PA amplifier, an Edirol FA-101 interface (although an EMU Tracker Pre would do just as well), and a Celeron E1200 computer with 512mb ram, XP embedded, UFD boot drive and 1TB HDD for music storage.
The coin acceptor is hooked up to the computer through the parallel port, accepts 1, 2, 5 and 10 baht coins, and the price at the house is set to 1 baht per song which is about 3 cents 🙂!
The USB keypad for song selection has the keycaps moved so that 123 is on top and 789 is at the bottom (like on a telephone) with corresponding remapping inside my software.
Well.. Time I drill some holes and install the Volume Up/Volume Down/Cancel Song buttons and MIC jacks 🙂.
///Leif
Yeah, computers can, but Windows generally can’t!
I also used to think it was easy.. I mean, when you run the Windows XP or 2000 setup, usb drives show up in the list too, and it lets you install to them, so I figured it would just work, and never gave it a second thought until I needed the functionality.. And sure, it begins to install, but reboots after the first bluescreen 😉.
///Leif
[quote author=”Modman”]Hey Leif, how do you make a PC boot from a flash drive?[/quote]
I believe there are distributions available from dubious sources online that can do it, for example TinyXP usb edition (no personal experience).
Me personally, I use Windows XP Embedded. It’s a pain in the neck and takes several hours of trial and error while learning it, but it’s nice because you can make such a nice and slim windows installation.
One really important component in XP Embedded is called EWF — Enhanced Write Filter.
It redirects all disk writes to memory, and only flushes it to the usb drive on shutdown, and only if you have told it to.This yields SEVERAL important advantages when booting from a cheap USB flash drive (UFD):
- UFDs read fast, write slow. Performance (boot speed) skyrockets if all they have to do is read.
- UFDs don’t have wear leveling and the flash memory inside wears out if you keep writing to it. If you stop it from writing completely, this doesn’t happen.
- No need to shut down properly. Just pull the power plug, no worries. It wasn’t writing to the disk, I guarantee it!
- Virus? Deleted an important file? Cruft? Just reboot the machine, back to new.
Of course, if nothing gets maintained during reboots, how do you save settings?
The answer is two partitions. Normally you can’t put partitions on a USB flash drive, but when you’ve booted from it, you can! So, assuming you have a 2GB flash drive, start by formatting the drive as 1.5GB partition with UFDPREP (command line utility included in windows xp embedded).. When you’ve booted from it, open the logical disk manager (which you hopefully included in your XPE image) and create another partition. This partition won’t be protected by EWF, so you just save your settings to it, and they’ll stick. In the case of Breakaway you’d just run the exe from that 2nd partition.Other than that, using UFDs themselves also has several advantages:
- PRICE. A hard drive is at least $50, a UFD is under $10.
- No moving parts. What’s there to wear out if you’re using EWF mentioned above?
- Easy to manage. Just unplug the UFD from the back of the target PC and plug it in your main PC, and you can copy files to and from it, clone to other drives etc.
I’ve spent MANY MANY hours fighting with XPE and figuring out some of its quirks, and it’s working extremely well for me now. It’s really nice to be able to boot in 31 seconds flat (turn on power to passing audio), but this result is not typical — not all PCs spend that little time in bios, it may take a while to init certain hardware etc etc.. 31 seconds flat is the fastest I have been able to do. Certain machines take almost a minute — but 55 seconds still ain’t a bad bootup time compared to what XP usually takes. For comparison, make sure you start your stopwatch at the same instant you actually press the power button.. Not at the end of the power-on self test!
Best,
///LeifI agree Stuart, it’s feasible possible to run just the Breakaway core, like we were talking about. But, Dr. J mentioned speaker management, like you’ll be getting for free on the windows version of Breakaway Live. It’s just not that easy to do it in hardware. Just imagine how many biquads we have to run to implement all the parametric eqs for all the possible speaker outputs.. Eight outputs, up to twelve PEQs for each, plus 6 bands of loudness-eq which must also be applied to each.. So that’s 18 by 8 = 144 biquads. That’s NOTHING for a cpu, but you’ll probably burn several DSPs on it. The whole "DSPs are better than CPUs for digital signal processing" has not been true since the late 90s. (Coming from the guy who implemented a 5-band compressor in a Cyrix 6×86 133 MHz in 1997) 😀.
///Leif
By the way, if anyone’s interested, my main workstation is a Core 2 Quad Q6600, 4GB RAM, WinXP 32-bit (so really only 3.4GB of ram), and two 24" HP w2408h panels for a total desktop resolution of 3840×1200. So far it’s plenty fast enough for what I do — except it would be nice to have better single-core performance for things like MP3 encoding. When Core i7 capable boards come down in price to about $100, I’ll probably upgrade — but I’m in no rush.
I also have a dedicated Celeron 430 machine (1.8 GHz single core) which runs a development version of Breakaway with PEQ, ITU meter, Oscilloscope displays etc.. One major thing that separates it from publically released Breakaway: Discrete 5.1 audio support 😉.
Anyway, my point is, you can do a lot even with extremely cheap CPUs today, and it’s generally not worth it to be on the bleeding edge.
///Leif
Mayasecret, I’m not sure what to tell you. The simple truth is that if I was to switch platforms today, it would take me at least a couple of years of hardcore work to get anywhere near proficient as a programmer on the mac, and then a couple of years to build any kind of decent code base.. That’s four years. And during those four years, I would not be able to do any actual work (i.e. develop products) — development would stand completely still while I arbitrarily change platforms..
Just for reference — the Breakaway *core* is not four years old yet.. I wrote it in 2006, so that makes it three years old. It has received several major upgrades since then, and I’ve done a multitude of projects around it — several for Linear Acoustic, the four public Breakaway products (personal, live, broadcast, broadcast asio), a karaoke jukebox, and 20 other things I can’t think of at the moment..
I get too many new ideas all the time to have that kind of time to spend idle. I’m afraid I’m gonna be stuck in Windows for the foreseeable future.
///Leif
quote :With the upcoming version of Breakaway Live, you’re starting to infringe into the world of DBX DriveRacks.Absolutely. In most cases, you’ll be able to just run Breakavay Live instead.
quote :If the newest version pans out, I would consider a fair value at around $2,000 per unit. This would undercut the closest competitor but still provide a great value to those running multi-speaker systems. I would also look at a computer controlled processor, eliminating all but the basic front panel controls.That would indeed be a bargain! Unfortunately, economic realities make it very difficult. When writing software, I can through everything but the kitchen sink in there with very little penalty. I did not write the Speaker EQ code specifically for this project, in fact I wrote those modules years ago! Adding it in was really just a matter of writing the user interface.
Hardware is different. To do it in hardware, you’d have to actually ADD physical things to do it! More DSPs, more I/O etc etc. You don’t have heaps of CPU power left over like you do in a PC.
Here’s an idea for you. Buy or build a cheap PC with 7.1 on-board audio. Install Windows XP. Install Breakaway Live. Install nothing else. There’s your speaker controller, for well under $1000.
///Leif
Simple questions rarely get simple answers around here, sorry 😀.
If it will be your primary workstation, I’d go for a Core 2 Quad, or a Core i7 if you can afford it. Price/performance wise, Core i7 is actually almost as good value as the Core 2 Quad, even including the (much) more expensive motherboard.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net is an excellent site for CPU benchmarks. Divide passmark score by the price of cpu + motherboard to determine value (price per passmark-point) and pick the best value one that you can afford!
Example (using newegg.com for price reference):
Celeron E1400 is $50, score 1072
Pentium E5200 is $70, score 1612
Core 2 Quad Q8200 is $160, score 3186
Core 2 Quad Q8400 is $185, score 3343
Core 2 Extreme QX9775 is $1550, score 4887
Core i7 920 is $280, score 5458
Core i7 950 is $570, score 6735So. Assuming we’re going with ASUS P5KPL-CM ($53, personal experience = fine board) for the Socket 775 CPUs, and MSI X58 Pro for ($185, no personal experience), we get the following Price/Performance values (excel formula for the E column: =ROUND(D1/SUM(B1:C1),1):
This tells us that the Core 2 Quad 8200 is the best value (performance per dollar), but the others aren’t far behind, except Core i7 950 which is too expensive, and qx9775 which is a lousy deal — does anyone actually buy those at that price?? (Although, I’m sure someone will — I keep teasing a friend for paying $1000 for a Core 2 Extreme dual core a couple of years ago) 🙂.
Of course, things change dramatically when we consider the whole package. So far, we only looked at motherboard and cpu, nothing else. Assuming we’ll be spending another $500 in parts for the system, like ram, case, monitor, vga card, sound card(s) etc:
Suddenly, the Core i7 920 is by far the best value. The q8200, which looked excellent before, is now quite a bit behind. Raw computer performance did not increase just because we added a monitor, sound card and all those other things!
So. It’s all about building a balanced system. Don’t spend too much money on ONE part — it will be wasted, unless you have a special need.
For example, do you need a dedicated system just to run BBP? Buy the Celeron E1400 (it’s PLENTY fast enough for BBP — in fact you can run two instances very comfortably), 512mb ram, the cheapest non-crap brand motherboard you can find, use a USB flash drive for booting so that you don’t need to buy a hard drive, etc.
On the other hand, if you’re building a workstation, make sure to include the estimated cost of other parts when making your calculation.
Have I confused you thoroughly yet? 🙂
Best,
///LeifHi George!
For HTPC with Dual View you need VGA PCIe x16, not x1. There are x1 VGA cards, and they are a specialty item, much more expensive as well as much slower. If they’re putting a slot in for people to put a video card in (which they must have, since they didn’t include hdmi, dvi or other tv out), then making that slot x1 can only be viewed as a grave mistake.
At newegg.com (big US-based online computer store) I see 457 PCIe x16 cards, and 2 (TWO!!) x1 cards. The cheapest x1 card is $99.. I wonder how many cents shuttle saved on not putting in an x16 socket.. In fact, they could have put an x16 socket in and only wired it up as x1 (afaik the PCIe standard fully supports this!) and you would have been able to use a standard x16 video card. It’s mindboggling to me that they didn’t at least do that.
And yes — for HTPC, you’ll want dual view as well as digital audio out (for surround).. You can’t have both with this machine.
Xonar D2 is indeed PCI, you’d have to get the Xonar D2X (or DX) which are PCIe. The cheaper one works just fine, I have two of them 🙂.
If you’re running BBP this way (with monitoring and mpx out), you will love BBP ASIO, which will give you true low latency monitoring in this setup 🙂.
Stereo expanders will not create that difference unless there is already a difference at the input. What you need is an auto-level-balancing input plug-in, not modifying the output post clipping! I’m actually planning to write an auto-balancing input plug-in (a friend asked for it already, and it seems like a good idea) so that hopefully won’t be too long.
I think I’ll make it ITU-based, since I have that code already. Oh the joys of a reusable code base. 😉
Best,
///Leif
