Breakaway buffer settings

A few things to try in Ots to possibly stop that from happening… Set your mic input to the same soundcard, and disable the "open soundcard" option, so that it doesn’t open the input even if you’re not using it.

Also try switching from the DirectX output, to the "Compat" output (aka MME).

If your converter (aka soundcard) has the option of setting the sync to be external or from a digital input OR using the internal clock… try using the internal clock — unless you’re running digital audio into the converter of course, and in that case you would want to sync to the input card, and try different sync methods on that card’s master clock. Trying internal first.

Also try running Ots in "Highest" priority (*not* realtime) and see if it has any more stutters.

It could be a number of things. Ots is historically not so stable on some machines (and more-so OS configurations), sometimes having nothing to do with the soundcard. I would suggest trying to have Ots support you so you can at least get Ots stable on your machine, without routing through Breakaway.

When you get that taken care of, it should be no problem to use Breakaway. Clearly the skipping problems are from Ots, and not Breakaway.

Hi Johnny!

Strange problem. I really don’t know what’s going on (because there’s nothing in Breakaway that would delay the sound for that long), but here’s how I would narrow the problem down further.

The first thing I would find out was whether it’s a matter of Breakaway receiving audio and not passing it for a couple of seconds, OR if it’s a matter of OtsAV not sending audio for a couple of seconds.

This is a critical question, because if it’s a matter of OtsAV not sending the audio, there’s no way for me to fix the problem, even if it doesn’t happen without Breakaway, because it wouldn’t inherently be something Breakaway is doing.

To find this out, the first thing I would do is to play audio with Winamp for 24 hours, all other things being equal.

Still drops out? Okay, it’s Breakaway. No dropout? We’ll need to dig deeper.

Next thing I would do, I would make Winamp play a continuous test tone.. Let’s say a quiet (-24dB should do it) tone at 18000hz. Something I would be able to put up with listening to for 24 hours, but that could be detected on the sound card output.

With Winamp’s test tone playing (you could use the in_tone input plug-in), I’d start up OtsAV and play music the way you normally do.

Then, I would use a second computer to *record* the output of primary computer. When I heard a skip, I’d go look at the recording. During the period where the OtsAV music dropped out — i would see if the 18khz test tone is still there. If it is, OtsAV dropped out, Winamp didn’t – would have to be fixed by OtsAV developers.

If they BOTH dropped out, the next thing I would do keep the current computer (Winamp + OtsAV + Breakaway), but set up an audio recording app to record from Breakaway Pipeline. Next time I heard the dropout, I’d check the recorded file. Did they both drop out? I have a bug to report to Eugene Muzychenko. Did neither drop out in the recorded file? Leif has a bug to find and fix 😉.

I agree that this is a tremendous amount of work (kind of like thinking through and writing this email was). Unfortunately, troubleshooting always IS a lot of work – there’s no real way around it.

Let me know how it works out, or if you decide to just live with it for now 😉

///Leif

Just having stumbled upon this conversation, I think I may be able to turn the spotlight back onto Breakaway.

I’ve had these mystic dropouts too, but I’ve been running my music through VLC media player or Media Player Classic. If these dropouts (which now thinking always have appeared after hours of activity) were caused by something else than CPU peaks, as they from time to time were, there might be a larger compatability question involved.

On the original topic: is there a massive manual available somewhere, and could it be linked somewhere useful, such as the actual site or Breakaway’s menu?

As Leif returns to the thread, I want to communicate my sincerest thanks for this great piece of software, it’s been exactly what I was looking for the past year or so. So far (I’ve been a user since 1.00) I’ve only managed to find one album of music which didn’t sound clearly better without extensive tweaking (and finally running a subcategory of rock with extreme ends of Classical or Radio Magic). With the correct setting the results in violence-orientated games (and movies) are out of this world, such as a flat granade pop finally finding the blast in it, or a high-caliber rifle sounding something other than a granny beating a carpet.

PS. A month back, after spending a few hours trapped behind a cheap mixer for a small hall, the idea of constructing a custom linux box and an application of Breakaway to process the audio signal after it’s been mixed and before it passess onto the speakers hit me. If you’d play your cards right, I’m can see how such a device could have huge commercial success among a crowd from small artists to large performance halls.

Keep up the good work! Greetings from Finland, the promised land of polarbears.

Hi

Breakaway is a wonderful software and I intend to buy two licenses to use with OTSAV DJ.
But the 3 seconds stoping after 6 Hours is unsuitable for may needs.

Thus, I’m trying to identify and isolate the problem in 3 steps:

– First – Yesterday: I played sound (a continuos tone) in OTSAV for 16 hours and recorded it in the same computer before to send it to the sound card (OTSAV has an option to do this), and, in the same time, recorded it in other computer, after pass through Breakaway and the sound card.

The sound recorded in the same computer, before the output, don’t stoped, is clean.

The sound recorded in the other computer, after output to Breakaway and sound card, stoped two times:

3.6 sec after 6:10:55 Hours
3.6 sec after 12:22:21 Hours

And at 9:17:31 Hours, have 41 Sec of distortion (soud like an helicopter).

– Second – today: I’m recording again, usig OTSAV without Breakaway.

– Third – tomorrow: I intend to record the same sound playing with Winamp.

Tomorrow, i’ll to tell what happened in the second step.

//Carlos

Hi again

The third step, part 1:

In this step, I played sound (a continuos tone) in WINAMP for 18:47 hours and recorded it in other computer, after pass through Breakaway and the sound card.

The sound stoped three times:

3.6sec after 6:10:57 Hours

3.6sec after 12:22:23 Hours.

3.5Sec after 18:33:47 Hours.

I’m now in the third step, part 2, playing the same sound with WINAMP and recording it in other computer, after pass the sound card, without Breakaway.

Tomorrow, i’ll report The third step, part 2.

Carlos

Hi cnbau!

That you for your excellent data! Very good, and it’s starting to make sense now, at least a little bit.

You mentioned 6 hours, 10 minutes and 57 seconds.

Let’s do some math.

6 hours is 360 minutes.. add the 10 minutes, that’s 370. Multiply by 60 for seconds, that’s 22200 seconds. Add in the 57, we’ve got 22257 seconds.

Now, multiply 22257 seconds by 48000 samples per second, and again by 4 for 4 bytes per sample (16-bit stereo). The result is 4273344000. Divide that by 2^32 (maximum 32-bit integer range) – 4294967296 / 4273344000 = 1.005…

Almost the same number. Obviously, this is a 32-bit value wrapping around somewhere in my code..

OR…

In the sound card driver.

Once, in a completely different project, I’ve seen a Kernel Streaming sound card driver show this symptom. It was a Sound Blaster Audigy 2, I was using Kernel Streaming, and it would just stall after 3 hours. At the time, I was doing 192000hz 1-channel, which is exactly twice the amount of data, so it makes sense.

This *could* be related.

So, I will ask you to try one more thing:

Try Breakaway in safe mode (either WaveOut or DirectSound).

Does it still do it?

///Leif