Winamp Plugin?

I think so.. It doesn’t make much sense to spend the development time to only work with one player, when Breakaway Audio Enhancer already works great with Winamp as well as other programs. Also I believe Winamp’s popularity is probably going down, not up. If there’s one player to target it’d probably be iTunes.

(I personally use Winamp!)

///Leif

I understand what you mean.. But hey, regarding the crossfading: Unless the input and output are widely disparate level, shouldn’t crossfading be smoother with the processor after than with the processor before the crossfader? With processing after, you get a highly accurate blend at the exact point of transition, but with processing before, you get a true fadeout before the next song starts, with nothing to counteract the fadeout. I guess it’s a matter of preference — I personally prefer the processing after the crossfading 🙂.

Regarding 4 zones, that all depends! By 4 zones do you mean playing different music, or playing the same music with different processing settings, or just 4 amps hooked up to one output so that they can have independent volume?

Breakaway Live (next version, any day now, i promise) will have some things no other of my processors have, including 8 speaker output with individual 24-band (yes that’s 24-band) PARAMETRIC eq, allowing for extremely accurate speaker equalization and a real speaker quality improvement. One could say that the Breakaway core itself subjectively improves the quality of the music, but speaker equalization objectively improves the quality of the speakers!

Speaker equalization takes patience, skill, pink noise, and a $50 Behringer ECM8000 microphone. It is SO worth the effort — you can expect a night-and-day improvement on almost any speaker, because speakers are very rarely flat frequency response.

Here’s 12 bands of EQ for one pair of speakers. Scroll down (in the actual program) for more. Four pairs of speakers are supported, with separate eq, and all for the same price as before — $129. All are fed from the same Breakaway processing core, though, so it’ll be the same music in all four pairs.

///Leif

Yes — and it’s cheaper than buying 4 copies of Breakaway Live (Live can actually run four stereo pairs in one instance of the program if you have a 4-instance license). However, it make be beyond the budget of a home system – a 4-instance license is $379. It depends on how serious you are. If you do use PEQ for each zone, each speaker separately, then it’s one hell of a bargain, for getting truly excellent audio quality. A single M Audio Delta 1010LT would take care of all 8 channels in a low latency fashion.

However, it currently offers EQ only on the first core. I think I’ll change that, and offer 2-channel eq (one pair of speakers) on every core.

Shoot pink noise from the program directly? Heck yes! Quick loopback calibration? No, I’m afraid not, because I don’t believe it can be done well. Yes, there’s hardware that does it — note that I included the word well. 🙂

The thing is, when you’re measuring, you get cancellations and echos all over the place, which affect the measured frequency response. The brain is very good at compensating for this, so we don’t even notice it — but nothing escapes the microphone. When calibrating manually, you naturally move the microphone around to get a good average, and get a "feel" for what’s a real peak and what’s just a temporary thing right where the microphone is. The former should be EQ’ed, the latter should not.

So, calibrating a system, for me, is an iterative process that takes about half an hour for a pair of speakers, maybe more.

I’ve released a free program called Breakaway RTA which makes PEQ-calibration possible. Check the Breakaway Professional Products forum!

I’ve also actually just released Breakaway Live 0.90.74 with all these new features (Except EQ only on the first core). Check it out.

///Leif