Using Breakaway live with OTSAV

Here’s two more examples. In these ones, I didn’t add any distortion — these songs were mastered this way right on the CD. Thus, I can’t show you the before / after, but they should be rather obvious.

If it doesn’t seem all that bad, listen in headphones instead of speakers.

[attachment=0:2m096y8c]rascal_chunk.mp3[/attachment:2m096y8c]
[attachment=1:2m096y8c]xy_chunk.mp3[/attachment:2m096y8c]

///Leif

NICE, 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

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:

And when the song changes, the file changes. Couldn’t be easier.

What options does OTS have to output files?

Best,
///Leif

This 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 – Winamp

The 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

Okay, 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,
///Leif

…and even using WAVs won’t always help, because some songs are mastered with the IM distortion built right in! I noticed it a few years ago, on a bunch of songs by t.A.T.u. (before I knew what it was called). I think the recent tune "American Boy" by Estelle shows it too.

If one were to question these producers, I bet they would revert to their usual defense, and claim that this is an "artistic use" of IM distortion. Aaack

😥