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hvz
PostPosted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 4:33 am 
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If the sound goes through your sound card, it will change... So don't use your sound card to capture it! When I started working on the FM Stereo and RDS parts of Stereo Tool, I bought a Creative X-Fi Audio... I returned it 1 week later because its output was far too different from what I was sending to it. The SB Live is older and has less good specs, so I wouldn't expect too much from it.

To see what data is sent to the sound card, in Winamp select the "Nullsoft Disk Writer" (out_disk.dll) plugin. That writes the Stereo Tool output directly to a .WAV file.

When I tried capturing audio from the Creative X-Fi card, this is what I sent to it:

Image

And this is what I read back:

Image

As you can probably imagine, this kind of changes will have a huge impact on the peak levels.
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hvz
PostPosted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 4:38 am 
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Quote:
ok and this is the file created from winam and ST and directly converted to wav (winamps disk writer)
and seems to be perfect.

Song short part2
There is something wrong though... If I upsample the data to 176.4 kHz, I still see lots of peaks. Is the quality set to Low? Or do you have all the FM settings turned off?

For FM transmitters, Stereo Tool upsamples the sound to find peaks that are not visible in the sample data, but will occur when sending it through the sound card. But because this costs a lot of CPU power, it ONLY does this when it detects that you are sending the output to an FM transmitter, ie. when any of the FM transmitter settings is enabled. (Maybe I should make it possible to turn this option on anyway). And it skips this step in Low Quality mode (or when you turn if off in the FM Configuration screen).
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Bojcha
PostPosted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 5:12 am 
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Quote:
Is the quality set to Low? Or do you have all the FM settings turned off?
nope
right now i don't use FM options .. and the CPU quality is on High. cpu is on 13% .. c2d e8400@4Ghz. :)

but... this is little confusing for me..
for me i don't even need to use FM options from ST .. we have a good FM transmitter an good stereo coder and RDS coder and that works good...
i am just interest what can i do with my audio before Stereo coding..

so question is .. your juli@ will do much better quality over creative card ? but i alredy know answer. :D

and Song part3
this is with FM ON .. and Encode stereo OFF. so should i use it with FM ON ?

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hvz
PostPosted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 5:23 am 
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No... I have to add an option to enable oversampling in situations like yours... I just hadn't anticipated this type of usage.

For now, just use it without FM ON (I suppose you have a clipper somewhere before the transmitter?). I'll add an option for this later.
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hvz
PostPosted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 5:33 am 
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Bojcha: I just realized that there is a way to get rid of the peaks!

Just enable FM, enable RDS but set the RDS volume and Pilot tone volume to 0.

That way, the FM features are being used, which tricks Stereo Tool into upsampling the signal. But you will still get the normal stereo output without RDS or pilot tone signal.
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Bojcha
PostPosted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 6:02 am 
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Quote:
Bojcha: I just realized that there is a way to get rid of the peaks!

Just enable FM, enable RDS but set the RDS volume and Pilot tone volume to 0.

That way, the FM features are being used, which tricks Stereo Tool into upsampling the signal. But you will still get the normal stereo output without RDS or pilot tone signal.

heh .. and that is the exact way how i record Song part3 :)
exept i was not set pilot volume and rds volume to 0.

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vamprecords
PostPosted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 12:38 pm 

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Martijn,

I've just tried this song, and the piano at the start of the song does indeed sound pretty bad.

I then turned Loudness, Final Limiter and Hard Limit off (and lowered the output volume), and with those settings I still heard the distortion.

So I went back to the original unprocessed version, and I heard some very minor distortion there. But... If I increase the treble a lot (which is basically what the multiband compressor does if there's a lack of high frequencies, as is the case at the start of this song), it sounds just as bad......

I have compared the output of 3 versions: 3.40 vs 3.50/20090327 (Loudness at 2.30 in both cases), and 3.50/20090320 vs 3.50/20090327 (FM Loud Europe preset), and I'm unable to tell if there's any difference in the distortion between these versions with this particular song.

Still, given the timing (you mentioned this just after I made the changes that I made in version 20090327, which COULD cause distortion), do you have some other songs where you hear this distortion?
Hans,

I tried other songs with piano's and did not hear any distortion, only on the (original) cd from Delain, also other tracks from this artist contain's distortion even without stereotool, so i think it's a production thing... (a very bad one i think)


Martijn
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Bojcha
 Post subject: Re: 20090328
PostPosted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 4:40 pm 
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testing ver.20090328...

first note ... Final limiter seems to be much "softer".

i don't use loudnes curently.. (must replace cpu) but with loudnes is much more dynamic and due final pre-limiter (i think) everything looks much softer but still loud. :)

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hvz
PostPosted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 5:23 pm 
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Ok.... I didn't change anything in the final limiter (or did you compare it with the original 3.40 version?)... What do you mean by "softer"? (that it sounds better, or that the volume is actually lower?). And compared to which version?
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Bojcha
PostPosted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 5:38 pm 
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Quote:
Ok.... I didn't change anything in the final limiter (or did you compare it with the original 3.40 version?)... What do you mean by "softer"? (that it sounds better, or that the volume is actually lower?). And compared to which version?
compared 3.40 for actual download Dec2008 and this last 20090328.

so.. i notice right now that i can put final-prelimiter to MAX and no any distorsions .. that was not case erlier.

oh .. notice from 2-3 minutes ago..
Sometimes FixAzimuth gets wild on some traks with some specific high tones.
Maybe the track ... i will monitor more.

edit:
False alarm for azimuth fix :D

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