Breakaway 1.20.12 Release Candidate

[Leif]

New Breakaway is up!

http://www.claessonedwards.com/rc/break … .12_rc.exe

Helix Preset updated

New preset: French Kiss – Awesome, warm, wet sound 🙂
New preset: Reference Heavy NR – Reference Heavy with noise reduction

Enjoy!

By the way, we’ve been working on a brand new web site, and it’ll go live on Monday. Release should not be far behind, so please test the heck out of RC12 😉.

Thanks guys,
///Leif

[Anonymous]

Hey Leif!

Good work! What do the red portions of the multiband meters indicate, downward expansion?

Stuart

[Leif]

100% correct, Stuart!

///Leif

[Anonymous]

Dance music sounds AWESOME with the french kiss preset. 😀

[Leif]

Thanks 🙂. After so many years working hard to design a processor that does what it does without ever audibly pumping, I would never have guessed that I would actually enjoy a preset that intentionally pumps! It’s addictive, somehow.

French Kiss uses a wideband compressor before the multiband to allow the kick drums of dance music to slightly punch holes into the mix, which (counter-intuitively) actually gives the bass a clear, clean quality, and somehow opens up the whole mix, especially in the Broadcast version when pushing for loudness.

What does everyone else think? 🙂

///Leif

[Anonymous]

I like the French Kiss preset a lot. As you say, it has a lot of punch to it. I would suggest perhaps being a little more aggressive with the downward expansion in the bass bands. I sometimes get a fair amount of rumble in the processed audio which doesn’t really seem to be part of the music. I guess that’s a good reason to have access to the controls 😉 – so we can start with a preset we like and then tweak it to fit our needs/ tastes.

Good work!
Stuart

[Leif]

Hi Stuart!

Full controls (thus giving the same features as $10,000 hardware products) for $29.95… You’d like that, wouldn’t you 😀.

///Leif

[Anonymous]

As long as I get the 5 grand of hardware that goes with those, I’d be satisfied 😉 Seriously though, you could raise the price quite a bit to reflect the increased feature set. I’m sure lots of us would be happy to reward your hard work with a lot more than $29.95 😛 .

Stuart

[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

[Anonymous]

Well, I’ve been a bit busy so I’ve checked out this version and in the words of Devo …. well if Devo had named their song this…. in two words…. Ship It! Ship It Good!

[Leif]

LMFAO 🙂

Thanks dude 🙂.

///Leif

[Anonymous]

Is there any way to get BA to load early enough at start up and stay active long enough to hear the Windows startup and shut down sounds so I know when these events have taken place without having to look at the screen? BA seems to be inactive when these would normally be audible.

Thanks,
Stuart

[Anonymous]

Hey Leif,

Would you put an audio taper on the volume control?

Thanks,
Stuart

[Leif]

Hi Stuart!

By audio taper, do you mean logarithmic pot as opposed to a linear pot?

It has a hybrid taper already, actually 🙂.

If it was purely linear, -6dB would be at 50%, and 0dB would be at 100%.
As it is, -12dB is at 75%.

If it was purely log, we’d waste a lot of pixels at the bottom end of the scale (below -60), where we shouldn’t be listening anyway since dithering noise would become apparent.

Is the current taper a problem?

///Leif

[Anonymous]

After adjusting the rates and buffers, I’ve actually managed to get clean sound at a reasonably low buffer size on both input and outputs with Breakaway 1.20.12. This seems improved from earlier candidates.

Though even at large buffer rates, I still get a pop when operating the bypass on or off, and some rough sound when changing presets while audio is being processed. Once set properly, all else is smooth-sounding.

I like the new sound on the Helix, and the French Kiss and NR preset that I saw on the Breakaway FM (now “Broadcaster”).

I’m looking forward to the Broadcaster Web version to try its features, as well.

Carl

[Author]

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