Silly change coming

Hey everyone, look, I don’t mind paying, but what if the company goes bankrupt tomorrow and I have to reinstall Breakaway One? Then what? Am I just stuck with it? I have it completely legally, so Leif should answer the customers. If, God forbid, you pass away tomorrow, or the website or support email stops working, what are those of us who bought it legally supposed to do? Are we just screwed? And another thing, since we demand at least that it be constantly updated with improvements, like other processors, please add the full range of the pilot once and for all. If I’m paying, I expect improvements and that the customer can choose the range for the stereo pilot. Add auto-eq, add the ability to duplicate audio channels if they are lost, like in the Omnia E9s, give life to the Breakaway One, and provide important updates more frequently. If you’re going to require payment to reactivate the license when installing it on a new PC, at least have the decency to add the features customers request. We BOUGHT it for this, and we don’t use pirated copies or anything like that. At least have the pleasure of pleasing your loyal customers who support you and use it LEGALLY.

I’ve been chewing on this for a good day now. Sorry to say, I’ve concluded that I’m finished with BAO if I have to pay a whopping 10 percent of what I paid for my HD core to reactivate it on a new PC. It already felt like a hassle, but this is egregious. However, I’m still interested in the next generation of BA Enahncer for my home theater, especially if it supports more than 2 channels.

I feel like BAO’s competition currently offers a more fully featured product for less money, doesn’t have bad licensing policies, and is constantly adding new features. I won’t even get started on how the developers actually interact with their community directly.

Again, I’m sorry, and if this gets moderated, I suppose I get why.

edit: I also want to say I’ve been a fan of Leif’s audio algos for a good 20 years now. So, I do feel bad.

I have received a reply from Alex Hartman who is now a partner in the company. I paste it below in its entirety for you to read and maybe comment on. I am seeking Leif’s permission to also post his response.

Please keep it pleasant.

Thanks for passing these along James.If you could pass these comments along to the community. Leif will also reply in his own words.

I understand the frustration of the “nickel and dime” feeling myself, I really do. In this world where development is expected to be supported by subscriptions, Leif and I share the sentiment that it’s bullshit to do so, that’s the real nickel and dime. But to Timmywa’s point, things are more expensive. I spend more time reissuing keys daily, for free. If you turned the situation around, would you be expected to work for 2-3 hours a day after being paid 10 years ago, once? Many people run the same equipment for audio processing for years. If you must change computers for a device critical to your operation, 15 dollars is a very small price to pay. Adobe charges you monthly for software you may only use a few days a year. We don’t for software intended (and expected) to work 24/7/365. If your hardware Orban, Omnia, or any other piece of equipment fails, do you expect them to give you a new one for free?

This expectation of being free forever is why companies go bankrupt. Existing customers built the company I will give that, but the software started as a labor of love and grew into something completely unexpected. We clearly state in the EULA that we offer no support of any kind, but we still provide it because we want everyone to succeed with Breakaway, regardless of the version, for free. Demanding updates honestly is unreasonable. Leif does provide updates from time to time. Although he admitted we should do more for the BreakawayOne community—it’s been far too long and customers do deserve to be heard on feature requests—but remember that those are in fact requests. BreakawayOne goes toe-to-toe against other, more expensive commercial offerings all the time and often times can beat the snot out of them. Stereo Tool is a good example. Hans has no filter and over the years ST has reached a point where you need a PhD in psychoacoustics to understand his software. It can be very difficult to use. He listened to every request and added them with little question. It made ST a monster, but that feature for 2 people clutters things up for everyone else. In those situations, Leif, as the sole developer, must thoughtfully weigh the time spent developing a feature for a handful of potential customers against the hindrance it might cause the rest of the user base. A lot of times those features don’t make sense for that level of product, but perhaps it belongs in another one, or even a new one that doesn’t exist yet. There is an entire 4x8ft whiteboard filled with feature requests for various programs Leif has created. I have added to that list personally, as have many others through forums, email, or—for those lucky enough—in person.

A few more direct answers to some questions:

We don’t give control over the pilot space because it adheres to the specification and to prevent users unfamiliar with the control and what it does from making mistakes. Modern tuners (as in made in the past 30 years) do not benefit from more or less stereo pilot. It’s a specification everyone has to adhere to for FM stereo to work. If you start deviating from that, what good is the specification? The pilot is already integrated, providing more loudness than other processors that inject the pilot, which causes a modulation hit. While some radios trigger stereo with as little as 4% pilot, others may require a minimum of 7% and certainly don’t benefit (quite the opposite!) from going over 9%. You don’t know how they design the discriminator circuits inside the radio reciever or what components they use, but they all follow the specification, so we follow it as well to ensure compatibility. There is a write-up Leif made a while back explaining other reasons for this and I can provide that if you’d like.

I don’t understand the Auto-EQ statement. Do you want BreakawayOne to decide the sound of your audio for you? I need a little more detail about what you’re asking for on that one. The number of bands determines the crossover frequencies; changing that on the fly is jarring to any listener. Jumping from a “voice” preset during a DJ talking to a customized Rustonium preset is pretty intense, sound-wise.

I’m also unclear about the statement regarding “duplicate channels if they are lost” statement. Is this for audio inputs, physical or AoIP? I know it’s not what one wants to hear because it’s an added (albeit inexpensive) cost, but BreakawayOne has a “mixer” of sorts built in. If you have a passthrough core running alongside an FM core, navigate to FM Proc->Misc->I/O and uner “Input 2” you can select the source to be the passthrough core with its own separate I/O (physical or AoIP) and determine when it should activate as the input to your FM core. This was designed for things like EAS insertion, mic breakthrough, or primary source issues (say a streaming codec goes down for instance). It will gracefully “fail back” to the main input once audio returns based on time and threshold. Was that what you meant by “duplicate channels if they are lost”? This also works for ANY core. AM, HD, even another passthrough core used for a STL.

If paying 10% of the cost of an HD core every 4-5 years is the breaking point, that’s unfortunate. Leif has never charged for major feature changes, additions, or upgrades from Breakaway Broadcast, etc back to 2009. Many software companies charge for major revisions and compatibility fixes (windows XP to windows 11 compatibility lifts are NOT easy to do), all the time. And providing other free-to-the-user utilities that cost us money and development time (Breakaway Pipeline for example) seems to offer no added value? We pay for that only to give it away to everyone regardless of use case.

We recently debated raising prices for new customers because of the associated costs. Ultimately, we adjusted some prices, but the core prices remained the same. We’re working on a few new things and updating some old ones. Leif got his head back in the game, there is movement and momentum coming back. I’ve been advocating that nobody should pay for the RDS encoder in 2026, so that’ll be included soon, free of charge with the Full FM license.

Moral of the story is that many reasons surround this change, and loyal customers are not triggering it at all. I have had loyal and known thieves do 2-3 key requests a month, some asking for new keys every few days. We know what they’re doing and have addressed those customers personally. As for the others, I’m sorry if 15 bucks breaks the bank for a $159 piece of software every 2-3 years, but I would put forth the challenge of finding more competent sounding software for the money. That 15 dollars isn’t going right into a Starbucks coffee, I promise, but it supports Leif and those around him to allow him to focus on these updates, feature requests and new programs without having to spend the time that we do issuing new keys, going to trade shows, visiting customers, moderating a a forum, and making sure that there is a future for BreakawayOne and Breakaway Software as a whole. It may not feel like it now, but I have seen behind the curtain, and everyone should enjoy what’s coming soon.

Alex Hartman
Partner
Optimized Media Group LLC
BreakawaySoftware.com

Leif has given me permission to re-post this from his email response to me.

Alex covered the business side, so let me just talk as the guy who writes the code.

First, the twitchiness is fair, and I would rather hear it than not. A lot of you have stuck with me through long quiet stretches, some for 20 years now, and that is not lost on me. So let me be straight with you about where my head is at.

On the replacement key fee: I hate it too, and I sat on it for a long time before pulling the trigger. It is not aimed at you. The person who swaps a NIC or builds a new PC every couple of years was never the problem. The problem is a handful of people doing two and three key requests a month, every month, and we know exactly who they are. The fee is friction aimed at them. If you are a normal user moving to new hardware, this is going to touch you once every few years, and I will not pretend $15 is nothing, but it is not the thing standing between you and great sound.

On “just add the features we ask for”: I want to explain why I weigh this as hard as I do, because from the outside it can look like I am ignoring you. Every feature I add is a maintenance tax I pay forever. It is not the afternoon or several days in some cases it takes to write it. It is carrying that code through every Windows version, every new core type, every odd hardware combination, for the entire life of the product. A feature three people wanted becomes weight that all of you carry in the interface and that I carry every time I touch the code again. Maintenance gets heavier and heavier over time, with an ever growing codebase _and_ userbase, and it’s been killing me. So when I say no, or not yet, it is never “I do not care”. It is “I have to be able to still stand behind this in ten years. How does that interact with X?” The requests are on the whiteboard. They are read. They are put on that whiteboard and not ignored. They are read, re-read several times over many different sessions. Because, something I wasn’t ready for back then, I might be now. Some of them are already in the pipeline. RDS is about to stop being a paid add-on. There is real momentum again.

On “what happens if you get hit by a bus, or the company folds, or the site goes dark”: this is the fair question, and it deserves a real answer. Breakaway has always been pay once, free updates for life, and I have never walked away from a product, even when I retired a whole family (the BBP owners got a free ride into BreakawayOne). So here is the commitment in writing: if Breakaway Software ever shuts down for good, we will release a final universal unlock so that every legitimate owner keeps running, forever, with no server and no key request needed. You bought it. You keep it. That is not changing because I got hit by a bus.

Now the stereo pilot request, because this one is worth your time, and it is easily the most misunderstood thing in my processor.

People ask for a wider pilot level range. There IS a control, but the range is deliberately tight, and that tight range is doing you a favor. I may have poorly explained it in the past, but lets clear that up.

BreakawayOne generates the pilot at exactly the right level, so if your pilot ends up reading low, it was never my stereo generator getting it wrong. It is a side effect of something upstream, and it points straight at a real problem, and it’s a BIG one.

Something after BreakawayOne in your chain, your MPX sound card or your exciter, is not DC coupled. That acts like a high-pass filter and tilts the carefully clipped flat tops, pivoting each one around its center so one half tilts inward and the other half kicks outward right past the rails. That outward half is your overshoot. Your modulation monitor screams overmodulation, say 125%. So you do the natural thing and turn the modulation down until the meter reads 100%. That right there is where your loudness died. 2 dB, gone, and the meter looks happy so you never suspect it. At the same time as we’re _clipping_ our audio for those extra dB’s of loudness, accepting the increased distortion and loss of clarity that this imposes (even wiht my psychoacoustic distortion masking clipper), we’re immediately losing 2 dB, which we’ll inevitably try to make up for by pushing the clipper even harder.

Now, because you scaled the whole signal down, all of a sudden the pilot reads low. So you reach for the pilot, crank it back up until it reads right, and call it done. But that low pilot reading was the ONE CLUE that anything was wrong, and it cannot happen any other way, because we generate the pilot correctly — I guarantee it. The tight range on that control exists so you _cannot_ paper over the problem. If you are jammed against the top of the pilot range trying to get it to read right, that is not a missing feature. That is BreakawayOne telling you your transmitter path is eating your sound. If you’re okay with less than perfect sound, BreakawayOne is _not_ the best choice for you.

The fix is cheap though, and readily available. A DC coupled DAC into a properly behaving transmitter solves it outright. Bob Orban had it right in his old whitepapers and with his published modifications to transmitters to get flat frequency response down to 0.1 Hz (-3dB point), for less than 1 percent overshoot. Forget that you can onlp hear down to 20 Hz, that has no bearing on waveform fidelity. I found a CM6631A USB DAC on eBay/AliExpress for around $40 that is DC coupled and puts out a glorious tight 5Vpp MPX. I was SHOCKED when I found it and hooked it up to a scope — I could not believe my eyes. Back in BBP days, I could only _dream_ of something like this.

Short of getting a proper DAC, turn up the Tilt correction in BreakawayOne for your lowest peak deviation (use the Square Wave test tone) and it will improve a lot, just not all the way. That should leave your pilot above 8%, which is within the 8-10% acceptable range. If it’s any lower than that, with the limited range control turned up, your airchain is not broadcast quality — period. I wrote this whole thing up once with oscilloscope shots and I am happy to post it. An external scope goes a long way in making the best of your signal for FM. They are inexpensive tools to validate the air chain from audio in to exciter in (especially nowadays — AliExpress again), making sure nothing goes wrong along the way.

THAT is the difference I care about. I would rather somewhat violently (like one of my three great danes does) nudge you into sounding as good as my audio processor can actually make you sound than hand you a knob that lets the meter lie to you.

Thanks for sticking with me. There is good stuff coming. Stay tuned.

///Leif

I meant that in AGC I use less range; I don’t leave it as is because I don’t like to give it so much AGC.

Your Spanish Broadcast Authority (or whatever they call it) must be very slack in administering the standards. In Australia, all stations are monitored in rotation and anyone overstepping the specifications would be taken off air, fined and then need to provide proof of conformity before getting their licence back. Even then, they may have to broadcast at a much lower output for a trial period before re-gaining their full licence.
The specification for the Pilot is there for a reason, and should not be allowed to be adjusted just to compete in the loudness games.

thank you , leif 🙂