NEW: Breakaway Live 0.90.79

Stuart:

Agh! You’re absolutely correct. I fixed the scale problem but completely forgot about the tooltips. Thank you — I’ve already fixed it in the source code, it’ll be in the next release.
Next release probably won’t take very long, I’m sure there’ll be more little bugfixes over the next few days.

Yes there is! The input meters are now ITU BS.1770 loudness meters. The colours are subjectively chosen to help the operator get the input level right (even though Breakaway will of course normalize the audio even if you don’t). There’s a slider in the settings window where you can adjust your ITU target level, which is the level you’re planning to feed into the processor. This actually adjusts the downward expanders and other parameters inside the core. It also moves the white markers around so that you can easily see where you want to be.

The meters are colour-coded according to how the input sounds if you don’t have a Breakaway core following it, which is indeed rather backwards, as they are sitting right at the input to the core. They’re coded to mimic how levels are perceived by humans, according to loudness standards for television. Green is good, yellow is a little too loud but okay for transients, red is too loud — it’s where someone would have to reach for their volume control to turn it down. Blue is dropping off the dial.

Breakaway will take basically any input level and get the output level in the green.

Here’s a screenshot from during development of my ITU BS.1770 implementation, including long-term graphs:

Left is input (before Breakaway), Right is output (after Breakaway). Standard "Reference Settings" were used!

The Red-all-the-way-to-the-top indication means clipping on the input. The source material here were different songs from different CDs.

DjSmooth:

There is no appreciable treble loss between 320 and 256kbps, you just get more artifacts. It can’t be fixed with EQ. However, if you want a sweet detail-boost EQ, try 15000hz, 1.0 octave, adjust gain to taste. Maybe +3.

///Leif

There is, actually! The Encoder plug-in gets called before the speaker controller, so by running in Speaker mode, you can use the speaker controller to correct the sound of your studio monitors, while still broadcasting the signal pre-correction (as it should).

However, the PEQ in the speaker controller should not be used for broadcasting, because it’s after the final limiter of the Breakaway core. There is another limiter in the speaker section, but that’s a protection limiter just to prevent clipping the sound card, and it is not as clean sounding as the dual-band limiter in the core. Even if it was, it would still be double limiting and double IM-distortion due to the first limiter limiting some things it shouldn’t have, and missing some peaks, which means the second limiter has to do it all over again, and all that remains of the first limiters job is the distortion it added! It’d be a really bad idea for broadcasting. This, incidentally, is why chaining two processors is a catastrophically bad idea. The limiters in the first processor will be vigorously limiting peaks (and adding distortion) which will then be undone in the second processor, while the distortion will still remain. It’s easy, really — peak limiting has to happen at the very end of the chain to be effective.

I will add parametric eq to the input of future versions of BA Live and BBP though. Probably at the same time I add stereo enhancers. After that, I’ll be satisfied for quite a while 😉.

///Leif

Argh! these stupid %#(/%!# antivirus scanners, I’m not even going to try to keep up.

Haven’t tried it on W7 but perhaps someone has? 🙂

///Leif

Downloading Windows 7 RC x64. Will get to the bottom of it.

Damn I wish I had this kind of bandwidth at home!

///Leif