Can Breakaway replace my processing

Hi Tino!

The Breakaway core algorithm itself is very quick – it only delays a couple of milliseconds.

If you run Breakaway Personal (the version available for download here) on a clean XP system, you can likely use Tiny buffering, which will likely be fast enough to monitor yourself in headphones.

However – Breakaway is not an FM limiter. It does not even pretend to do pre-emphasis or absolute analog peak control. You could use it if you add on other peak limiting, but then you’re back to square one — latency problem.

Aeromax-HDFM, which will be released this year, uses the Breakaway core and a new state of the art FM back-end, which will make you the cleanest station on the dial while keeping pace with the ones with traditional processors cranked to 11.

However, Aeromax-HDFM throughput delay, MINIMUM, is a whopping half a second. Up to several seconds if you enable several features. So, monitoring off-air is right out, but it does have a low latency output with only Breakaway core processing (no FM limiting) which is perfect for DJ monitoring.

So, the answer to all three questions is YES, but not yet, and not with the $29.95 Breakaway Personal version.

It’s for listening to music played from your computer, nothing more, nothing less.

///Leif

Hi Tino!

Indeed – although Aeromax will actually have a "breakaway-only" output, so you won’t have to run the current Breakaway at all – it’s included.

Aeromax will support HDFM, and yes – for latency that low, it’s a necessity.

The reason latency is a problem is that the hardware isn’t designed for low latency audio processing. The way the PCI bus is designed, it’s possible for one device to lock up the bus for undefined periods of time, and while the bus is locked, no other data can go through – including audio. The only way around this is buffering, and buffering = latency.

I once heard someone say something to the effect of, "with CPUs as fast as they are today, why does audio processing have any latency at all?". My jaw dropped, but I shut it again, not wanting to get into it at the time 😉. The thing is that algorithms can use the delay they (intentionally) introduce to their advantage. For example a look-ahead limiter, such as the ones in Breakaway, uses a very very tiny delay to know when a peak is coming.

In aeromax-hdfm, the delay comes from phase linear filters, advanced psychoacoustics, and a few other delay-based decision making algorithms I can’t reveal yet, and it adds up quickly.

Yes – Aeromax is multithreaded to use two cores in a dual-core cpu. A quad core CPU means you’ll have two cores free to do other things with 🙂.

OSX version, yes! It’s coming.

Linux version, no plans yet – it would be a major undertaking for me (especially since I have no Linux development experience) and closed source software is not what most users of this platform want, so I’m not sure the market is there.

///Leif

XP can be extremely stable though. When I worked for "the #1 net-radio station and network" I managed over 200 production machines running XP SP1, and except for the "bug" with the Windows Audio Service, which made it so the machine just would NOT make sound at all after exactly 365 days uptime 😆 I would have had all 200+ machines uptime OVER 5 years without rebooting, before they switched to a new datacenter and new machines.

What’s the last linux distribution you heard of with even 365 days uptime, for over 5 cycles, without any problems whatsoever (on 200+ machines)? The only problem at all we ever had was 2 hard drives failing, which is perfectly acceptable with over 200 1U servers running non-stop for over 5 years.

At any rate, I’m sure there’s a few linux distros that could pull it off, but… XP is hangin’ tough right there with em. Windows2000 also isn’t half bad, although I’ve never tried to run one that long, I bet it could. But it wouldn’t be a candidate for running HDFM because it doesn’t support 192kHz sampling-rate. 😉