Breakaway DJ

[JesseG]

[quote author=”tngdj”]Smaller, more compact gui to include the bypass without having to go to another screen;[/quote]
Single left-click on the system tray icon, and click bypass. 😉

[quote author=”tngdj”]the eq GUI would be much more effective if it looked and operated like a standard everyday garden variety type eq (sliders up and down versus its current left and right bubble.[/quote]
But that would be a graphic EQ with fixed Q widths and fixed frequencies. The Breakaway speaker EQ is a parametric EQ and is much more powerful and lets you get exactly the EQ sound you want. Not to mention you usually need less filters, which adds less to the sound. A graphic EQ won’t allow you to get exactly the EQ you want.

[quote author=”tngdj”]I like it. I’m keeping it and am looking forward to see what it does in a large venue.[/quote]
wait till you hear it on a decent system. 😉 it isn’t even worth comparing to anything you compared it to, including Virtual DJ’s auto crap. by the way… the reason the Virtual DJ EQs distort is because they don’t have much headroom… in addition there is a quite bad brick-wall limiter on the main outputs.

if you want to get optimum quality (without switching to something that sucks a lot less than Virtual DJ), turn off all possible automatic leveling & eqing, and run mp3Gain (non destructive) on your tracks down to 89dB or less (83dB is the standard loudness that CDs were designed for fyi). this will give Virtual DJ EQs some headroom to work with. then make sure you are mixing with a target LKFS of -24dB which is the international standard for program loudness, and that will prevent almost any chance that you will hit Virtual DJ’s brickwall limiter. The input loudness meters on Breakaway are LKFS, in case you hadn’t noticed, and there’s a "dial norm" control in the settings which alters a few things like the thresholds for the multiband downward expander (aka noise reduction). 🙂

Breakaway will bring the levels up to sound very nice & loud all on its own, and with Breakaway DJ the levels and presets are optimized for larger systems. That’s why you don’t find any of the "louder" presets in there, yet. Some may be tweaked for DJ purposes, some probably wont because it doesn’t make sense to do, like New York.

Try this out, and let us know how it goes. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. There’s a reason that Breakaway’s core is in $15,000 processors used on everything from the SuperBowl and the Olympics to the Grammy’s and over 75% of all digital TV… and that these guys are all using loudness standards for every step of the production that are put there to ensure there will be more than enough headroom for the peaks. 8)

[powerjam]

Just have to say that I have been using Breakaway DJ for gigs for the last couple of months and it has made the sound of my system much better. And basically have had no problems, so that’s excellent for what was a Beta release!

I had an issue last week where after booting the computer then starting my OtsAv, the Asio driver for BDJ was not recognized so I had to restart OtsAV, then when I did that it saw the Breakaway Asio driver, but everytime I typed in the Ots search bar the audio would slow down and glitch. So I switched to my backup laptop for a song (and wow what a difference in sound – I don’t have BDJ on the other laptop!) – then I had to close down breakaway, unplug my Echo DJx card, plug it back in, then restart BDJ and then finally OtsAV and it was fine after that. There must be some time of initialization that has to be done at startup for it to work properly. I guess I have to be more patient after logging in before starting OtsAV.

[Milky]

I’ve not had the same problem at all, powerjam. However, I’m running on a desktop with an internal PCI card (M-Audio). I recall that you were having ASIO glitches before you installed BA-DJ, so there must be some sort of timing issue that Breakaway masks most of the time.

[Anonymous]

Anybody out there lol. Hey Lief are you going to be updating the program soon. To add new stuff. I have not seen anyone posting anything recently. I know that someone might have a new setting for you. And I was wondering if that was coming out soon or you just working on multiple stuff?

[JesseG]

He’s so insanely busy right now, what… with NAB coming up and all. 8)

[silverfox]

[quote author=”JesseG”]He’s so insanely busy right now, what… with NAB coming up and all. 8)[/quote]

Thanks it’s nice to have someone taking care of the store.. 8)

[Leif]

Hi guys!

Busy doesn’t even begin to describe it.. Plus, I now live in a much nicer town with much more fun things to do, which makes it harder to actually sit down and do real work 🙂.

Anyway I’ve just finished an upgrade key scheme which will make it possible to for example upgrade BA Live / BBP to more instances, as well as upgrade BDJ to BDJ PRO.

BDJ PRO doesn’t exist yet, but I plan for it to include 4-cores, and the 3rd and 4th cores will be able to function as microphone processors for DJ voiceover and/or karaoke mode. It will also include TCV (time-code vinyl) support!

Presets will be the same in BDJ and BDJ PRO, and I definitely want to include more presets, but I’m finding that when doing light processing (which is really all one can do for a big speaker system), there’s not that many things to change, not so many variables to play with. I myself always keep it on "reference settings" and do the rest with EQ. Does anyone have any suggestions for what to add? I can’t think of anything that’s missing 🙂.

Tngdj, thank you very much for your review! I’m glad you’re liking it 🙂.

Regarding the user interface, did you try resizing it, making it as small as it can get? How much smaller could it possibly get, it can get down to around 30 pixels tall when docked to the top or bottom. If you could do a mockup in photoshop for what you would like it to look like and include, I could always work on it.

Regarding the EQ, you’re right that a regular graphic EQ is more familiar, and Jesse is right that parametric EQ is much more powerful, and actually easier to use once you get used to it. In Breakaway DJ there’s the best of both, because by default the frequencies are set in a sensible manner, evenly spaced. Thus, you could actually treat the gain sliders as your vertical EQ sliders and ignore the frequency/width sliders.

I’m beginning to think what this thing needs the most is a manual 🙂. Am I right?

///Leif

[Anonymous]

Hi Lief this is not my review it is the review of one of the top Bose guys on there boards. He is very fussy when it comes to sound and he more than likely did not know how to do certain things but I’m sure he has learned it by now. His review was actually a huge compliment for your product. I brought it to our board so that other DJ’s interested in top quality sound would have the options that you offer. I love your product and use them as much as possible.

[Milky]

[quote author=”Leif”]Fewer buffers = less delay, so if 2 buffers works reliably, that’s excellent.

ASIO always uses two buffers — i.e. when the sound card is reading from buffer 1, the audio app is writing to buffer 2, and vice versa.

Kernel Streaming drivers are not usually reliable with less than 3, but since 2 works for you, consider yourself lucky 🙂.

///Leif[/quote]

Now I’m confused. When I first installed BADJ, I just set the buffers to the lowest levels. Everything worked, so I left it that way. I was "tinkering" the other day, and hit the "Test" button in I/O configuration. I noticed that the jitter was running at 300% (!), so I went through the process of trying various buffer combinations. 512 dropped the jitter down to 10%, so I left it set at that. Later that evening, I noticed the odd pop or crackle coming in, so it seems that I get better performance even with 300% jitter.
In a related question, I use an M-Audio audiophile 192 soundcard, and it has it own buffer settings. I have always had it set to the minimum (64). Would there be any advantage in aligning it with whatever buffer count works best in BADJ or is this paramter ignored?

[silverfox]

Anything happening at all with the DJ product?

Updates, fixes, improvements, menu, documentation, release 1 (something) !!!!! ❓

[djscooby]

hello guyz

i currenly use bbp dj for my sets on a fujitsu siemens Xi 3650 laptop, this laptop has a multimedia touch panel over the keyboard and when i press the sound panel and lower the volume the bbp dj goes muted and it stucks on mute i cant change it it keeps muting,,, even if i shut it down close the virtual dj it keeps stuck unless i log of windows and log in again… its not a virtual dj problem since i tried it without the vdj on and still the same…

anyone have the same problem??

if i remember correcly the sound touch panel when its pressed it gives "bbbbb" order (i discovered that when i have a notepad open and play with the panel it writes bbbbbbbbbb)

Any idea or any fix on that would be greatly appreciated…

Thanxs in advance

os: win7 x64

[JesseG]

[quote author=”djscooby”]if i remember correcly the sound touch panel when its pressed it gives "bbbbb" order (i discovered that when i have a notepad open and play with the panel it writes bbbbbbbbbb)[/quote]

That doesn’t sound right at all. Sounds like the software that handles the key pressings if really screwed up and/or bad design. You could try two things.

#1 update the software that is handling those key presses
#2 completely remove the software that is handling those key presses

[djscooby]

Dear JesseG I did all those but still the same…

i’m going to format the laptop and send it on repair cause as i’ve searched for that problem i find out that its a harware fault not software…
is it possible to back up my bbp dj licence because they told me that the laptop has to have it’s original windows (crapy vista home) in order to not have any problem with warranty…

[DjSmoothOrl]

I hate to be the one to rain on the parade but I read through this entire thread and there are two things missing, as far as I can tell.

1) no mention for Serato Scratch Live.. THE main software that club Djs use
2) no mention of the Mac operating system.

Go into almost in club in the US and go visit the Dj booth and you’re likely to see a Macbook Pro running Scratch Live.

If Breakaway Dj will work with Scratch Live on a Macbook, I’ll buy it. 🙂

[JesseG]

[quote author=”DjSmoothOrl”]1) no mention for Serato Scratch Live.. THE main software that club Djs use
2) no mention of the Mac operating system.[/quote]
Well since you just mentioned it, consider it mentioned. 😉

Also… just because it’s the popular, doesn’t mean it’s the best. I have several friends that are in the industry these units come out of, and after a few of them testing everything that’s out there, they agree the best is at least one of the ones that isn’t tied to proprietary hardware. In not MixVibes DVS taking the cake, for now.

With setups like Serato, the software is tied to proprietary hardware which isn’t necessarily good quality to begin with. Combined with the complacency of being #1 popularity wise, they haven’t been trying to improve the quality of their product, but instead made it even cheaper to turn a higher profit.

Compared to software like MixVibes that’s pushing the envelopes in every direction (last week a new beta came out with VST plugin support!!!), paired with high quality hardware like an RME Fireface… it’s almost a joke.

No offense. 🙂

And a final note… Apple doesn’t give a crap about the audio scene anymore despite their buying Emagic and partnering with Apogee Digital… case in point, the new MacBook Pros don’t even have Firewire on them. Sort of crapping in the face of Apogee, and everyone that uses a Firewire converter of any make or model… for probably a mere $5 more profit per machine if that. Nice, Apple. 😉

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