Omnia A/XE
Processed Audio Encoding For Windows
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Recapture control of your audio streams with Omnia A/XE - the competition-crushing, market-dominating, accept-no-substitutes Omnia sound for your audio workstation. Sound so pure, clean and compelling that it's almost an unfair advantage.
Omnia A/XE can process audio for a variety of applications, bitrate-reduced and linear. It runs in the background as a Windows service, can be fully-managed and configured remotely with a web browser, and can even process and encode multiple streams in various formats simultaneously.
Encode directly to MP3 or AAC, feed a Shoutcast-style or Windows Media Server in the MP3 format, or stream to Adobe Flash clients through a Wowza Media Server. You can also pair Omnia A/XE with your existing Windows Media, Real, mpgPRO or MP3 streaming encoder.
The new Virtual Patch Cable allows Omnia A/XE to receive, process, and send audio to other software on the PC. Internally encoded Shoutcast or Wowza server streams can be “tagged” with "now-playing" information received from automation systems or another application. We've even built-in a scheduler to allow streams to be started and stopped at specific times, as well as processing presets can be changed on a schedule, perhaps processing the morning show differently than the afternoon one.
Included with A/XE is a license to the multi-channel version of the Axia IP-Audio driver. Customers with a Livewire installation can use the Axia IP-Audio driver to read or write audio directly from the network without the need for hardware audio cards.
Omnia A/XE features adjustable wide-band AGC with a three-band compressor/limiter, IIF EQ and low-pass filter, and a precision look-ahead final limiter to prevent clipping. Resulting streams are cleaner, clearer, and with more presence and detail.
Existing A/X users can upgrade to A/XE at no charge. Click here for details.
Hardware Requirements:
- Windows XP and later
- Minimum 512MB RAM
- 20MB free hard-drive space
- Network Interface Card
Frequently Asked Questions
As of the writing of this manual, we have not yet tested IceCast in our lab, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t work. W. Cox, an A/XE customer, sent us the following details on configuring IceCast:
Short version is you have to tell IceCast that you are sending it a ShoutCast style stream. I did that by adding this to my main icecast config file:
<listen-socket> <port>8000</port> <shoutcast-mount>/example.aac</shoutcast-mount> </listen-socket>The mount and port obviously have to match what you have the encoder [A/XE] setup to output...
Read More: How do I configure Omnia A/XE to work with IceCast?
OS: 32‐bit Windows XP and later. A/XE has been tested on XP, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 Enterprise Edition (build 7600). A network interface card is required.
NOTE: On Vista and Windows 7 the IP-Audio driver has an issue with device names. All device instances appear with the same name so it is difficult to tell them apart. We are working on resolving this issue.
The sections below show CPU usage under different usage scenarios. All tests were performed on a PC with the following specifications:
- CPU: Intel Core2 Quad Q9550 @ 2.83 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB*
- OS: 32‐bit Windows 7 Enterprise (build 7600)
*The test PC has a large amount of memory in order to support future testing on other 64‐bit OS versions. As you can see under the test results below, A/XE uses a rather small amount of memory.
AALC Encode Test
For this test, Windows Media Player played an audio file to one end of the Virtual Audio Cable driver. 8 AAC encoder instances were then set up. Each instance read the audio from the same Virtual Audio Cable. The audio was processed with the ‘Music 24 kbps’ preset and then encoded to AAC‐LC (MPEG4) at 32kbps, stereo. The audio was made available though the internal stream server but no client connected and received those streams. A client connection may bump up the CPU and memory usage slightly but not by a significant amount.
| Encoder Count | Average CPU usage for the A/XE service |
|---|---|
| 1 | 7.4% |
| 2 | 14.4% |
| 3 | 20.2% |
| 4 | 25.5% |
| 5 | 32.1% |
| 6 | 37.4% |
| 7 | 42.7% |
| 8 | 48.8% |
The memory usage for the A/XE service went up to 34 MB.
MP3 Encode Test
This test used the same setup as above but set the encoding to MP3 at 96kbps, 44100 Hz, stereo. The results were very close to the AAC‐LC test above.
| Encoder Count | Average CPU usage for the A/XE service |
|---|---|
| 1 | 7.7% |
| 2 | 15.0% |
| 3 | 20.5% |
| 4 | 26.1% |
| 5 | 31.1% |
| 6 | 36.5% |
| 7 | 41.8% |
| 8 | 47.2% |
The memory use went up to 30 MB.
All application configuration information is stored to a single file named Options.xml. This is a plain text file that can be viewed (and edited) using Windows’ Notepad or another text editor.
Options.xml is stored in the application data directory. This directory resides in the Microsoft‐recommended location. This location is different for different version of Windows. On XP it is under ‘C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Telos Systems\Omnia AXE’ while on Window 7 it is under ‘C:\ProgramData\Telos Systems\Omnia AXE’. For this reason we include a program shortcut named ‘Locate Options.xml’. When selected, it will open a new Windows Explorer window in the directory that stores Options.xml.
A/XE extends Omnia A/X in many areas. Where A/X could only process one audio input per PC, A/XE can handle multiple audio inputs at the same time. In addition to audio processing, A/XE can also encode the audio to MP3 or AAC and send the encoded audio to multiple servers at the same time. Using the included virtual audio cable, A/XE can accept audio from other application on the same PC without needing to go through a physical sound card. It is also able to feed audio to other applications on the same PC (e.g. third‐party encoders).
