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You know, there’s so many things in the pipeline, I don’t even know which particular thing he was referring to 😉.
///Leif
"American Boy" by Estelle is pure clipping distortion — although clipping will also cause some IMD, it is very different from the IMD distortion caused by look-ahead limiters.
That particular song was clipped at least twice. You can see it by looking on the scope. First, they hard-clipped it like crazy — then it went through something analog, or maybe a non phase linear high pass filter, so that all the clipped edges are tilting.. and then, they clipped it again, and called it a release! Congratulations on a mastering job well done, guys. 🙄
It’s not the first time I’ve seen it, but that particularly song is some of the worst sound quality I have ever heard from a modern mass-market release. It’s right up there with Rush – Vapor Trails and Metallica – Death Magnetic.
TATU, on the other hand, is absolutely the type of IM distortion I’m talking about. In a way it’s more insidious than clipping distortion, because everyone is familiar with the sound of blown speakers / overdriven amplifiers, but limiter-induced IM distortion doesn’t sound like that, so people do not immediately recognize it. The ears give up just the same though — without consciously knowing why.
Best,
///LeifWhoa, Octimax 5.1 for Winamp?
That product was never publically released — I’ve only ever given copies of the development version to friends. That’s very disappointing. Good thing it’s long obsolete.Indeed, the OctiMax cores (both Classic and 5.1) did have a severe problem with the midrange excessively ducking. It was a problem inherent to the algorithm, and because of the nature of it, it was impossible to tweak around, even with the full control preset editor. Solving that problem was one of the major night-and-day improvements when I first developed the Breakaway core from scratch — and of course it has only gotten better since. 🙂
Breakaway Live should run well on older systems as well. If Broadcast is too heavy for your system, try Live! 🙂
Regarding Reload/Save — it’s a bug on my part, plain and simple. It should be saving when you shut down, you shouldn’t have to ask it to. So, I’ll fix it for the next version 🙂.
Best regards,
///LeifMartijn, obviously this is not normal.
I tried your code — it works perfectly for me.
Perhaps some garbage has gotten into your system registry, somehow?
Please open Regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareClaessonEdwardsBreakawayBroadcast
Make sure this key is empty. If there are any values (such as reg_key, activation_key etc), delete them. Then, try again.
Best,
///LeifNot a dumb question at all. If you switch to "Meter" mode and enlarge the window, you should see numbers next to the meter. This number shows you exactly what each stage is doing at any time.
If you see the AGC meter sitting at -3, that means it’s attenuating by 3dB.
Backing down the input level into breakaway will not help, because the damage to the music has already been done in mastering. If they backed down in mastering, before the limiter, THAT would make a difference. After the limiter, it’s too late.
///Leif
Richard, it’s certainly possible that the tracks are damaged beyond repair before they even reach you 🙁.
In that case, lighter processing would indeed make sense. The CHR preset is not a bad preset though, and there’s lots of room to dial it down.
You’re using Breakaway Live, right?
Try these settings:
CHR
Final Drive -2.5
Range 40
Power 25
Speed 50
Bass Cut: -15OR even better:
Twente
Final Drive: -2.0 dB
Everything else default.Why do I keep turning down the Final Drive so much?
Simple answer: Dance music needs PUNCH. Without dynamics in the bass register, the bass becomes a fatiguing rumble instead of the repeating stomach-punches we all know and love. What better way to get the feet going? 🙂Bass is a very inefficient use of waveform levels.. Thus, when we’re going for loudness (i.e. turning up final drive), the bass is the first thing to go. Thus, Dance music and Loudness Wars, simply do not mix! (I wish the record industry understood this).
Once we’ve politely declined to partake in the loudness war, and taken a step back, all of a sudden we’ve got lots of options for how to truly improve the sound.
Why is the Twente preset better?
Because of the very slow B1 and B2 response — to allow the punch of the dance music to be retained (as long as the bass clipper doesn’t mangle it afterwards, which it won’t with final drive at -2).
I’ve been testing the Twente preset with (real 70s) Disco music now — it sounds incredible!
Modern dance music will not sound as good 😥 but at least this way the processing will not make it worse — it will just provide cut-to-cut consistency and levelling, without adding IM.
Best,
///LeifOkay, I have a solution for title streaming with OTS!
I’ve written a Winamp DSP plugin whose only function is to write the name of the currently playing song to a file. 🙂
[attachment=0:zpc9eegq]dsp_title_output.zip[/attachment:zpc9eegq]
Unzip to C:OtsLabsWinampPlugins, and then load it into OTS as if it was shoutcast!
Check the ini file too. OTS doesn’t really behave like Winamp, and I couldn’t find where to customize the output, so I solved the problems programmatically instead.
;Songinfo_Output_Characters_To_Skip_After_Dot=13
…removes the tslabs.com/ mangled url from the beginning of the title.;Songinfo_Output_Characters_To_Trim_At_End=7
..cleans up the {(C)s} garbage characters from the end. I have no idea what that was supposed to be, but I wouldn’t want it in my stream. 😉Make sure to remove the semicolon from the beginning of the line, otherwise they won’t actually take effect. 🙂
Best,
///LeifThis may be slightly more detailed than you wanted, but you did ask 😀.
Edcast or Shoutcast gets the titles by grabbing the window title from window specified by the calling application.
Normally, they’re called from Winamp, and Winamp gives plug-ins a handle to its own main window.
The Winamp window title is something like:
5. White Lion – Wait – Winamp
or
71. Van Halen – Panama – Winamp
or
511. Steely Dan – Reelin’ in the years – WinampThe first part is the playlist number. The encoder ignores this part, as well as the trailing "- Winamp".
So, Breakaway emulates this, and makes an invisible window just for the purpose of having a window to hand to Edcast (or other encoders) and feed titles to in this manner. This way, the title comes into the encoder.
I do not know exactly how the encoder sends it to the shoutcast server, but suffice it to say, it does.
I do know exactly how the shoutcast server sends it to the player, though!
Shoutcast-compliant MP3 players (such as Winamp) will let the server know that they’re Shoutcast compliant. The Server will then respond and say "wonderful — I will send you one byte of metadata every 8192 bytes", for example. It is then up to the player to count the byte, and set aside every eight-thousand-one-hundred-and-ninety-second byte, stack them up, and display them as the song title.
This is why ripping a stream with WGET yields a title-streaming-less mp3 file. WGET is not a shoutcast compliant host, so it does not specifically request metadata, and thus the server doesn’t send it. If it did, there would be blips and data errors, as mp3 players wouldn’t know how to handle this data!
Anyway..
So there’s NO way to get OTS to output a file or something like that?That wouldn’t be ideal. I’ll install the demo version in a VM and take a look.
///Leif
No problem! I’ve been listening ever since — I even heard when you switched the codec, since the stream went dead a couple of times 😉.
I even heard a BBP commercial once 😀.
Good choice of music, I’ll be listening.
The Phase Scrambler and Phase Rotator are different. I recommend the internal Phase Scrambler over the Phase Rotator plug-in. Impact/Clunk and Bass-EFX are great for flavour though, combined with the internal phase scrambler.
Title streaming:
Breakaway can read the titles from a file, and hand them to the encoder.Thus, if you can make your automation system (OTS), in whichever contorted way, write the currently playing title (and ONLY that) to a text file, then you’re good.
As an example, the entire contents of the text file might be:
code :Steve Miller Band - SwingtownAnd when the song changes, the file changes. Couldn’t be easier.
What options does OTS have to output files?
Best,
///LeifHi Molsk!
The change in volume when you hit Bypass, depends completely on the input level you are feeding to Breakaway at the time.
Because Breakaway is so effective at normalizing, it’s also rather treacherous — you have no idea what the input level REALLY is, until you bypass.
If you play a modern, overly loudly mastered CD directly into breakaway without changing the volume, whether it been converted to MP3 or not, chances are bypass will be LOUDER than processed.
Unfortunately, the feature you’re asking for — a bypass which keeps the level constant — is conceptually impossible. A bypass mode which alters the audio is akin to dehydrated water, or fat-free bacon. If it did any processing, it simply wouldn’t be bypass anymore – period. 😉
I wonder, why is it that it’s quieter in Bypass? Basically all music released the last 10 years is full volume (or beyond) on the CD. It should match the Bypass volume pretty well. Check the input oscilloscope in Breakaway, and turn up the volume in your player higher.. As long as it’s not hitting the edges (=clipping), you’re good.
I do see what you mean though — you want to be able to separate the "enhancement" from the "normalization".. The simple truth is that the "enhancement" is actually a side-effect of the way we do the normalization. That’s why the enhancement sounds so natural — we’re not trying to enhance anything, it just happens by itself, in a natural way, without us having to add anything. For this reason, it’s also impossible to separate them.
Regarding saving settings for every song, the thing is, Breakaway isn’t a mastering audio processor — conceptually it’s more like a broadcast audio processor, in that it’s "set-and-forget". Changing the settings is indeed fun (I know!), but the real goal is to provide consistency no matter what you throw at it, without having to worry about the audio processor at all. Set, forget, and enjoy! 🙂
I’m extremely careful about what features to put in, as more features makes it harder to use, and Breakaway is supposed to be as mainstream / mass appeal / easy to use, as an audio processor of this caliber can possibly get.
Sorry about the post full of nays.. I’ll try to be more cooperative next time 😉. Thanks for your comments.
Best regards,
///LeifNICE, Riplee!
Refreshingly dynamic and punchy. There’s actual headroom — the drums stick out above the rest. Well-mastered source material too (classic rock). Sounds awesome!
The only thing I can think of to improve is the lame codec — the 3.90.3 codec does a better job at lower bitrates (128 included) than the newer ones do. It’s not a coincidence / oversight that we’re recommending that particular one instead of the newer versions. If you like, you can always A/B them — I have already. 😉
Anyway, it sounds great. I’ll be listening!
Best,
///Leif
