Stereo Tool

If you're using Task Manager to measure the CPU load: The values it reports are are very unreliable! I've seen jumps between 0% and 20% with nearly no difference in the processing where if I use other (more reliable) measurement methods, the two are equal.

I use Process explorer. Its better than task manager but mostly for finding out stuff about processes and being easier to read. What do you use?

I'm still having problems with the audio stuttering when using high CPU.
Could this be stereo tool, or Break away live?

EDIT - Fixed stuttering by routing final output through Stereo Tool FM direct to sound card output. But all other FM options are turned off.

EDIT QUESTION - Why can't we use pre-emphasis when Direct2Soundcard option is used? There is an emphasis option in FM but it's a registered option. I don't want to use that with-out registering. D:

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BTW, the steepness seems better...at least from the aspect of not seeing as much of the lighter shading in the bars. Artifacts are artifacts, so is the processing better, or just the display? These things I ask myself... (is there an echo in here)?

Anyway, I have a curiosity. Might be nothing. Set the highpass to 150 and notice the activity remaining in bands 1 and 2. Might just be the natural imperfections of a bandpass and relative attenuation not getting all of it, but, I'm just tinkering and musing...

In the FM transmitter section, direct to sound card options for "send to winamp | unprocessed and normal output" are sending the same processed audio.
Winamp DSP ver. 6.01 beta 13

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That's because HighPass Filter is after multiband.

hmm.. and LowPass too.

If that is the case, why does setting it to never phase linear affect the display of Mulitband?

Also, from maybe a perhaps naive point of view, if you're going to attenuate out a portion of the audio stream, why would you attempt to compress / limit it first, then get rid of it, rather than getting rid of it without processing it then looking at the compression / limiting that was needed without the data that the user wanted to not have in the stream?

Few quick answers:
- Highpass: 'Never phase linear' does not cause any artifacts, so I could put it as the 1st processing step without any issues. (And that's the only place where I _can_ filter without artifacts). Phase linear filtering DOES cause artifacts, if I do that BEFORE AGC and Multiband, the artifacts will be greatly increased by them (mostly by AGC, but also by Multiband if a high Multiband input level is used).
Will check it. Edit: Just did, and seems to work fine? 'unprocessed' = input, 'normal output' - compressed output...???
Artifacts are same or better than before.
You mean pre-emphasis as FM option? I suppose that's what you're using Direct Soundcard thingy for? Then you'll already get de-emphasized sound back to Winamp if you choose 'Normal processing'. What would you want here?
I use a different approach: I load the Winamp plugin, maximize the priority of Winamp and then let Winamp write the output to disk (so it runs at maximum speed), then I let it run for some time and I check how much it has processed. This gives *much* more precise values (I can easily measure a 1% performance difference - in Task Manager terms that would be a difference between 10% and 10.1%...)

Thanks... I'm still trying to tweak that very last bit... I've moved the highpass up to 40 because I was still getting some rattling. Perhaps a non-phase linear highpass could be added directly to the AGC window as an option?

On a related subject, have you ever considered a user-configurable band-stop filter (aka notch or band-reject)? I've got a spike somewhere between 60 and 120 that is annoying as can be, but I can't get at it.

Rattling: Which latency do you use? And phase linear or non-phase linear?
AGC: The only place where I can put a non-phase linear processor is BEFORE any other processing. During processing it's not possible anymore due to certain processing techniques that I'm using, especially at lower latencies that gives horrible artifacts - that's also the reason why I had to change the 'phase rotation' (also non phase linear!) behavior for the lowest latencies.
In the past I've written some noise removal filters that could for example remove 50 Hz (or 60 Hz) hums from audio without touching the actual audio - these could first 'learn' the frequencies that needed to be removed and then do it. I might at some point add something like that to Stereo Tool...

Rattling = my equipment, nothing to do with you... For example, one rattle that was annoying me sounded like the diaphragm of my headphones clicking, but it turned out to be vibration of the plastic housing. It went away when I put my hand on the earpiece, thus deadening the vibration. Fortunately that's not noticable when I'm not sending through bass only, so it's somewhat of a ghost that I was chasing. I do need new cans though. I've gotten so used to how light these are (Bose Triport). The old pair of Sony MDR-V6 that I had may have been more accurate, but these are so much more comfortable.

Note: Yes, I know the triports of this era do some stuff with the bass. The spike exists when played through my Logitech Z-2200s as well, so it's not the headphones. I've just moved to using the headphones because of constant complaining about "boom boom" from the other people in the house...

I'm using 4096 and non-linear... The reason I was asking about this is because I was tinkering trying to find the troublesome spike and noticed that even if I set the highpass to max (150), I was still seeing movement in the first two bands in multiband. The second band movement is not surprising, depending on the dB/Octave slope you're using, but I wasn't expecting it to be as much as it was, and was expecting nothing going on in the first band.
So, is the preamp a processing step then?
I knew about the hum filtering, but what I'm chasing after is decidedly not a hum. It's a bass spike that is probably 1-2 Hz wide, probably between 80 and 100. I'm still trying to locate it, but without some sort of notch, the best I can do is attempt to minimize the damage to the surrounding frequencies...