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Are you saying that you have purchased BA1 and not yet received your licence?
Keith is sadly no longer with us, but John has picked up the ball, and usually gets the paperwork done within 24 hours. Try this email address john@claessonedwards.comThanks Milkmaster. I have sent a note to that address with what I hope is all of the necessary info.
I also contacted John, and he told me that he had requested some information from you about your system under “System License Summary” back on the 13th of March.
I assume that that was when you were still wrestling with the AAC problem, so, if that is resolved, please provide him the information generated under that tab, and you should be good to go.Hey Milky…
John sent me another request for the license info that I’d already sent 3 times. I don’t know where it’s going, perhaps data heaven. It sent it as a reply to that e-mail and am still wondering if it got there. No auto-acknowledgement if there is such a thing.
BA1 works great for us now. We’re running an HD4 station and Internet streaming. AAC is running the main feeds. We’ve found a sweet setting with Plutonium that gives us maximum loudness on those Chinese ‘Part 15 Certified’ transmitters that friends are running the stream on. It seems as loud as the local commercial stations despite the ‘mitter’s built in audio limiting that has to be dealt with.
We found that cranking back the Deep Bass on Plutonium a bit reduces total overmod, allowing more loudness. And by pushing up the HD Treble control, we can mostly overcome the apparent 50us filtering they use.
It’s not the performance I get with my licensed translator’s PTek 300 TX and BA1 baseband input, but it sounds decent for an ‘under $200’ transmitter and a $228 processor. (Computer not included)
Woah! Now I’m confused.
Are you streaming or FTA broadcasting? If you are using “one of those Chinese transmitters” it suggests that you are transmitting (FTA), but you mention friends “streaming”. Maybe doing both? Are you using pre-emphasis on the FTA?Just to finalise the original issue, did you get your licencing issue sorted, or are you still waiting? John has responded to me, saying that he will happily generate your licence as soon as he has (at least) the MAC address of your PC (to which your licence is bound).
BTW, this is a link that John provided after I gave you the link to the AAC encoder I use. I’m not sure if it is the same, or a later version. I will endeavour to establish that, but, if you want to try it, this is the link https://www.dropbox.com/s/lfvdrs944cjs7y6/Audio_Encoder_Codecs_setup.exe?dl=0.
Am streaming to an HD transmitter via the BA1. Also using the processed audio via speaker jack to feed the Chinese transmitter. Running it in mono to decrease multipath from the attic antenna.
I have now sent the License info copied directly from the License info button on BA1 not once but four times. First 3 times to the address on the purchase page. Then again directly to John as a reply to his e-mail to me on his own account.
Still nothing. I don’t know if I’m ending up in the spam folder or something, but I’d really like to get my license to get rid of the barker.
Things are great now. Thanks to all for their help. License got rid of those PSAs. My thanks to John for fixing things and the little extra bonus for my trouble. Thank you!
It turns out that my many e-mails were going to the spam box. So no matter how loudly you bark, nobody notices you in the spam box.
Many thanks especially to Mr. Klorox and Milky for taking the time to troubleshoot this for me. It works and I am grateful.
You can hear it in operation here:
http://supercfl.ddns.net:20110 and :20111 for higher bit rate. AAC+ of course. Still battling startup changes from rebuilding from scratch this month. We sold the licensed transmitter and are now living on the HD4 channel. But the new owner got all of our previous equipment so I have been busy. Getting the new owner squared away and starting all over again on HD4 has kept me busy since March 1. Which is good.The Chinese transmitters I’m allegedly using are not commercial grade. They’re consumer devices and take a standard stereo audio stream straight out of an iPod or whatever you have. No pre-emphasis issues as it’s built in. I suspect it’s the 50 ms European standard because it’s a little muddy. But with a little extra goose from the HD treble setting, it’s just fine. Good and loud, both, but not as nice as feeding a REAL transmitter some processed baseband audio.
Great to hear it is all finally resolved. The process is supposed to be seamless, but, obviously, it wasn’t in your case.
We are here to help where we can.
Ah, that last link Milky posted for the encoders is apparently the same executable I downloaded in 2020, according to checksum. That helps explain where it came from. Thanks!
Secondly, your initial link to the Zip from the Australian domain is not being downloaded in Chrome. It’s being blocked cause it thinks it’s harmful. I was going to compare the two files, but that’s not possible. I recommend changing that link to the new one on Dropbox if possible.
Hmm. That’s weird, because I tested it (downloaded the zip file) after I uploaded it. Maybe because I’m in Australia? Anyway, DrSandi was also able to download, so maybe it’s something in the browser which needs to be relaxed?
I was able to force a download of the first zip and indeed the two links do contain the same AAC encoder. Since it was so tricky to find, and alternatives like FAAC are out there, I would still like to figure out the custom command-line equivalent just to document it somewhere. Perhaps I need to contact the FAAC community for insight. I’m really not clear on what switches I need to use to get it to stream encode.
This is a direct quote from an email response to me on the subject from the great man himself – from the 23 March, 2022.
“It’s also possible that a command line (stdin/stdout) version of FAAC could work, but last I checked it didn’t produce nearly the same quality as Coding Technology’s encoder which is that codec pack.”
I agree, we need at least one other AAC alternative, preferably one that is actively being developed, so I would welcome any feedback if you are able to open some dialogue.
I was messing with this the other day, and I feel like I’m on the right track. I’m trying to figure out as much as I can before asking for help from the FAAC folks. I was able to get the stream enabled, and I can connect to it from my phone, but no audio data is being encoded (it shows 0kbps in the encoding bitrate). I have a hunch it’s the MIME Type data. Any thoughts on what I should use for this?
This is my current custom encoder command line
“C:\Program Files\BreakawayOne\faac.exe” -R 48000 -B 32 -C 2 -c %samplerate% -q 5000 -b %bitrate% –
That’s the -R is the input sample rate, -B is the input bit-depth, -C is the number of input channels, -q is the quality. The final hyphen tells it to use stdin/stdout. It also creates a tiny empty audio file in the FAAC directory.
Great work, Mr K.
Perhaps some of the parameters stretch the envelope? For instance, what are the min/max options for “quality”? In the light of Leif’s comment about the quality comparison, perhaps he found it wasn’t possible to get the same from the FAAC model.It’s great that you got an output file, albeit empty. That suggests that it must be somewhere near the end of the process it is failing.
When I loaded my streaming PC originally I had initially used BUTT and a few other broadcasting tools. When I loaded BA1 as far as I recall AAC and AAC+ were already in menu and worked fine. However in preperation of purchasing BA1 and also sort out some issues with slowness on my PC – I reimaged PC and had to reload BA1, but can not get AAC or AAC+ on menu. Reading above have reloaded BUTT which had a link to the AACplus.dll which I have loaded to the BA1 main directory. However still not listed. Any simple ideas to fix please?
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