Okay, Hijack v239 is out.

This is the first release to include an adaptation of genixia's Tone (Bass/Treble) controls. They appear on the Hijack menu, and have mappable button codes as well: "BassAdj" and "TrebleAdj".

v238 had two changes: removed the "random dance" selection code (it just uses the built-in ones again), and fixed the accidental PopUp's on the 5x4 EQ screens. If you have any "dance=" lines in config.ini, you'll have to delete them again now.

v237 added some debounce logic (with a 1/3 second delay) to the headlight sense for dimming the front panel display.

Enjoy.

So the whole dance=breakdance.raw option is completely gone now... meaning i should delete it from the FAQ?? Why'd you remove it just out of curiosity...

[edit] gone from the FAQ as of now... and notice there's now a changelog in the last entry. =]

awwe man so we cant have the random daces anymore?

Yeah, it's gone. I could tell you why, but then I'd have to kill you.

>Rob: One of the main features of the empeg is that it's perfect

And since that's the case, there's no need to a silly hack like the "dance=" thingie.

Actually, I'm kinda hoping it ("dance=") will be obsolete soon anyway.

Cheers

You TEASE.

-Zeke

Ah, I love the smell of fresh software in the morning.

Mark, I just tried out the latest version and the tone controls work great! I'm impressed, thanks Mark and Genixia.

I only skimmed the threads on the programming details, so I don't quite understand how they work. The only thing I gleaned in detail from those threads is that there was a bug in the L/R locking for the EQ settings (confirmed, by the way, will be FITNR), but I didn't really understand exactly what these tone controls are doing to my EQ settings.

So how do they work. Do they actually alter my saved EQ presets?

Does the tone control hack affect the *current* EQ settings? I worked very hard to come up with those settings.

Calvin

Thanks a lot, Mark.

It works great!!!

Alberto

I'll have to defer to genixia (are you there?) for the full explanation of this. But from what I can see in the code, it looks like it should not mess up the saved EQ settings.

The tone (bass/treble) controls are applied on top of EQ settings, without the player knowing about it, so the player has no reason to modify any of it's saved settings. Genixia?

-ml

Sorry, I've been out.

Yeah, the tone controls will not affect any stored eq settings. Hijack doesn't have any visbility into those - they are stored and restored somewhere in flash by the player.

The tone controls are accomplished by overloading bands 9 and 10 of both left and right channels in 2x10 eq mode, with preselected q and f values, and then providing access to the gain. (BTW, unlike the first proof of concept patch I posted, there is no need to use the players eq to set any values - they are hardcoded in Hijack).

If you are in 4x5 eq, this translates to band 5 of all four eqs, but 2 of them will be doing bass, and 2 treble. I have no easy way of testing to know which is which, so if anyone is using 4x5 mode, can you give me some feedback. I'm guessing that if bass only affected rear, and treble the front, then that would be ok, as most cars tend to provide more bass in the rear and more treble in the front. These tone controls weren't originally envisiged to be used in 4x5 mode...

So that means that eqs can still be used underneath the tone controls. But bands 9 and 10 of your eq wont be effected when you are using tone and bass., so that leaves 2x8 eqs for your settings. (Or 4x4..)
(If you can't get a decent baseline eq in 2x8 bands, or 4x4 bands, then you have a big problem wrt to your amp and speaker setups, and no amount of tone control is going to help you. )


If you turn the bass setting to "Off" then hijack will restore whatever the eq for band 9 was, and ditto for treble and band 10. If you can find a use for this, just be aware that the restored values are those that the player first applied at boot - so if you are in the habit of changing which of your eqs is selected on a regular basis, the following could occur:

Boot. Player sets eq 1
Tone controls save bands 9/10 of eq 1 at boot.
User turns on tone controls, overriding bands 9/10
User changes selected eq to eq 2
User turns off tone controls. Tone controls reapply bands 9/10 of eq 1 - but eq 2 is active for bands 1-8

The workarounds are to reboot after changing selected eqs, or to have bands 9/10 unused (gain set to 0dB) or identical in every eq

I don't see this as being a large enough problem to be worth the extra coding required to stop it from happening in the first place.

As Mark said, the player has no concept that we've hijacked these eq bands, so will continue to display whatever it thinks they are. But, if you try to change them in the eq, then the player will apply the new eq and hijack the bands *back* from the tone controls. Just go into the tone controls and give them a flick to re-hijack them.

And you need to have notify=1 in your config.ini for the tone controls to automatically initialise at boot!

Apologies for forgetting to mention this earlier!

No, that's just a leftover file in my kernel directory.

Ignore it.

I am taking advantage of the EQ ... using all the 10 bands (the setup was done once , using a spectrum analizer).
I have a suggestion to take advantage of the tone controls in a more useful way:
I think is better to use the band 1 for the bass and the 10 for the treble. this is the way i usualy set the eq: 1 for the wery low end of the spectrum and 10 for rhe very hight.
It will be great if the hijack control acts just on the gain , leaving freq and Q uncanged. This will allow the people to customize the tone controls.
If you like the idea of fixing the Q and freq to some defoult value , you could put a item into the menu to let the user chose between two modes : Tone default mode or Tone Custom mode ... or something like this.
Hope i was clear...and useful... sorry for my English.

Okay, v240 is out. The only change is that the display dimmer logic has been reverted back to the pre-v237 state, which should work better than the experimental logic in v237-v239.

Cheers

I procrastinated between using the first and last bands or the first 2 bands or the last 2 bands. I decided to keep them together in the end. I suppose that this could be made config.ini'able..but I that wasn't on my current plans.

My original proof-of-concept patch worked with the underlying eq bands f and q values, and only adjusted the gains in the way that you suggested. I changed this to make the tone controls easier to use. There is currently a channel-lock bug where if channel-lock was set then the values aren't guarranteed to be identical, and I wanted to be sure that they were for the tone controls, or it'd sound horrid. I also wanted to make it plug and play for those who weren't comfortable with the eq interface.

There is another reason - the q factor used in tone controls is *very* low to ensure that the controls affect a broad range of frequencies in a smooth manner. It is highly unlikely that any band of you real eq bands has a q factor that is suitable for tone control, so if you were to try this then you wouldn't get the result that you desired. If you used a spectrum analyser to set your eqs and you have used all 10 bands, then is likely that your eqs have a relatively high q factor, and their effect is to either remove resonances or reinforce holes (the purpose of an eq). So because of the differences between what the eq and the tone controls are trying to achieve, it makes sense for the tone controls to use 2 bands that are together visually. I chose the last 2 purely arbitrarily.

The target 'audience' for these controls was really to help out the large number of users who couldn't or wouldn't set the eqs properly - but wanted a simple to understand and use tone control to help balance the sound, using the last 2 bands made sense here. If they had set any eqs, it was unlikely that they'd be using that many bands.

The best solution for you at the moment is to copy your original eq to a new eq, and then to modify that so that
the most effective 8 of your bands are using the first 8 eqs.

I'm not likely to make any changes to the way that this works until more people have played with it and provided feedback, or I could be playing tag with my implementations.

I'm guessing that this isn't really what you were hoping to hear, but the tone controls aren't going to be perfect for everybody until we discover how to use the DSPs inbuilt tone controls. Until then the eq band hijack is a compromise, and my aim in that is to make it as useful as possible for as many users as possible.

"The target 'audience' for these controls was really to help out the large number of users who couldn't or wouldn't set the eqs properly - but wanted a simple to understand and use tone control to help balance the sound"

Genixia's talking about me here.

Yup, me too!

One thing I noticed...
When your in the bass setting and you hit the top button to back out, it sets your setting to off and doesnt back you out.
The treble setting seems to work normally.

Z~

That's how it is supposed to work: one press of "TOP" turns the feature off, and a subsequent press of "TOP" quits from the menus.

Same as for ALL of the other Hijack menu thingies, including "Treble".

Cheers

Oh...
youre right.
um, ahem...


Quick, look out behind you!!!

(run run run run run)

Important Changes!

It is no longer necessary to have notify=1 in your config.ini as of Hijack v245. The method that the tone controls are initialised has changed - instead of waiting for the player to start and trying to catch this with notify, the tone controls are now initialised whenever the player attempts to set the eq. This solution is far more robust, and removes the DC non-restore bug that was found. It also means that the strange non-sync'ed eq possibiliy mentioned in the previous post cannot occur anymore - the tone controls will keep better tabs on what the eq set by the player is, and will restore the bands from the last applied eq when the tone control is turned Off.

ie, it should Just Work(tm)