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Breakaway Audio Processor for Windows System

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Darwin:
OK - here are some problems I am having - Breakaway worked great after the first system start. After the second, all I got from my speakers was INCREDIBLY distorted sound. After confirming the problem was present regardless of whether or not I was processing the output to my speakers with Breakaway or not (ie had "Bypass Breakway" selected or not), I messed around with the buffer size in Breakaway. No go. Finally shutdown Breakaway et voila! Problem solved. Restarted Breakaway and revelled in the sound enhancement. Problem appeared all over again on subsequent boot. Same steps taken to resolve the issue. I disabled Breakaway starting with my system and again revelled in the sound processing. Flash forward to this morning (did nothing audio related yesterday and didn't start Breakaway): I thought I'd put it through its paces a bit. Well, well... Everytime I try to start it, I get an "Audio backend is active" message. No problem, I thought. I shutdown my media player and tried again. Nope. Rebooted and then tried before firing up a media player. No joy. Rebooted again. Same problem. I suppose the only solution is going to be to reinstall Breakaway...  well, first I'll try re-enabling Breakaway starting with Windows and reboot and see what happens. Not too impressed thus far...

Any suggestions, scancode? This is really odd because it worked BRILLIANTLY before with each of the media players that I tried this morning. As far as I can tell it hasn't updated itself and I haven't installed/uninstalled anything related to audio output/processing for ages. I wonder if this is something to do with the DRM that you mentioned in your review, though I can't think of a thing that I have changed about my system in the past month.

Darwin:
Alright - final post in this thread on this problem; I'll be filing a bug report and letting Claesson-Edwards take it from here.

FWIW - I got it working. I enabled (via WinPatrol) Breakaway starting with my system and rebooted. Got an error message: "Error starting audio engine: Child Process not responding". Cancelled out of Breakaway and shut it down. Restarted it. Got the "Audio backend is active" error with this additional info: Input: 44099.99 (the decimal part was dropping slowly), Output: 47999.50 (decimal dropping quite quickly). Underruns=0, Overruns=0, Resets=0". I used the wizard to go into SafeMode and set the buffer to "large" and it started working. Stopped everything, re-ran the wizard and set it to (for want of a better way of putting it) Regular processing and a medium buffer and the sound was garbled (though identifiable through the distortion). Shut down my media player, re-ran Breakaway's wizard and all is now well...

Like I said, I am about to copy and paste this and my previous post and shift this problem to Claesson-Edwards, but thought I'd post here for posterity  ;D

WinXP Pro Sp-3, Centrino Single Core 1.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, SigmaTel Audio (integrated).

Grorgy:
Thanks for that Darwin, I'm not 100% sure as, as usual, I was playing around with stuff so it may be something else, but, my little USB disk, when plugged in, now prevents the system from booting correctly. (seems to work ok when not plugged in but removing breakaway doesn't fix it).  Explorer is failing to start correctly, I can get process explorer up and restart explorer and it works briefly but then hangs again, but as I say so long as the drive isn't plugged in these problems don't appear.  Of course it could just be a coincidence and my drive was/is  on the way out anyway and just chose now.  Still it sounds good, and the flexibility compared to dfx for instance is great.

Grorgy:
Well, it was coincidence, I've been amusing myself with finding HDD to plug in and its only that 1.  So its a hardware error not software, Breakaway or any other.  And breakaway is still sounding good  ;)


Edit: Just to fix spelling

Darwin:
I've no major problems remaining with Breakaway other than the error message on system start mentioned above. I have to hit "ok", which shuts down Breakaway, and then restart Breakaway and all is well. The developer is looking at the issue and will get back to me.

Fingers crossed!

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