What is the best free radio station automation software that works with shoutcast that is easy to use??
Over on the ALPB Forums scroll through my "Sunday Clicks" column and find the link to LineIn PlugOn for Winamp, and find the click for the latest version of Winamp.
This allows connecting Zara through Winamp which enables using all the handy DSP Plugins which allow Shoutcast streaming.
I do this at kdxradio(dot)com and it works smoothly.
Right now there's a large storm in the area and I'm shutting down for safety.
Report on your prograess.
To DJbout it... there is another key bit of free software needed to make the Zara / Winamp combination work, and that is a "virtual cable", of which there are two known to exist.
The one actually called "Virtual Cable" has a small price-tag, and there's a completely free version which does the same job.
The virtual cable patches the output from Zara to the LineIn PlugIn which is placed in the Winamp Playlist, and the DSP Plugins connect to the Shoutcast Encoders.
The heart of the storm passed south of here earlier, but with the station shut down for security I went into a deep sleep in which three dream women in the secretarial pool spent time with me goofing off, but the details are confidential and this website is no place to mention it.
I just use ZaraRadio and have the streaming setup on a separate machine. I have a program that pulls the song title information from Zara and pushes it to the stream so the songs display correctly.
RETRO RADIO I am asking about how you connect the audio between two computors...
Of course Zara can output to an analog output and be re-digitized into the 2nd computor...
Or you could stream Zara over an ethernet connection to the other computer...
How do you make that hop?
Mine currently just takes the AM feed with a wideband tuner, in the past I have hooked up it directly off the "record" output of the board or had winamp handle the processing and streaming and have the transmitter fed by the shoutcast computer output. (In that case the board was directly connected to the shoutcast PC and Zara was hooked up to one of the boards inputs) I plan on eventually tapping into the aphex output for streaming.
Edit: At the full power our stream is fed by an FM tuner.
Any other free radio automation program that works shoutcast??
The original question was "which radio automation software is best" but my only experience is with Zara.
Two other free automation packages get mentioned and there are youtube videos on these...
Which one is best?
Do they work with Shoutcast?
Actually there are a lot of questions packed into the one-line opening post: "What is the best free radio station automation software that works with shoutcast that is easy to use??"
The part "...that works with Shoutcast" can mean either of two different things:
It could be asking, which automation software works best when streaming from a Shoutcast Server?... which is a software that streams MP3 files when encoded by a Shoutcast encoder installed as a DSP in Winamp;
Or, it could be asking which automation software streams to the Directory at Shoutcast(dot)com, which can be done from servers other than the Shoutcast servers.
I don't know the answers to most of these versions of the question, but maybe we need to reset and find out more about what the question is asking?
Which free porgram works streaming to a shoutcast server??
RadiDJ and feed it to Altacast 1.0 winamp plugin. the altacast plugin pulls metadata from RadioDJ and sends it along the shoutcast stream. i am using two diferent networked PC's one to stream and one to automate. the streaming pc connects over lan to the automation pc for metadata acquisition. eventually i might seperate the Database and automation into seperate pc's they run on the same one for now.
this is all experimentation stages for something big i want to eventually try and get off the ground which will necessitate a high bandwidth symetrical gateway and a dedicated database pc.
i'm thinking along the lines of maybe tourist area, campground and/or nursing home radio using part 15 and closed private streaming setup.
i would have the database pc running mariadb and multiple automation pc's with different format's, etc and just connect stream to desired format and there would be a pc on the recieving end to insert localized ID's, liners, psa's, commercials, etc. which would then feed a part 15 over the aire setup. or just have the source fully run automation and administer it via VNC and do VT and such from my studio at home.
i have some crazy idea's i am toying with in my head right now.
First, let me say I am not streaming publicly at this time, officially, I am still in test mode to verify reliability etc. It works very well. In another words, I stream to my house, my phone, my wifes phone when she wants, and a couple of other people I trust to not share the link at present.
I am using RadioDJ on a Laptop with Win7, music is housed on an external drive, and the audio is sent into a mixer from the laptop for AM broadcast. The laptop Also has AltCast installed and sends the stream to the IceCast server software I installed on a much newer computer setting outside my secondary router, but behind the router supplied by my ISP in what I call the DMZ.
Uptime has been excellant thus far for both the laptop and the IceCast server. I am streaming only MP3 at present, but like Part 15 said, you can generate multiple streams with either different encoding, or different content.
I prefer to receive the stream at home on Winamp. It plays the song name etc as it plays, in fact, it plays my station tagline also.
Once you begin to understand the RadioDJ software capabilities, it is not hard to manage. And, I love the ability to manually update the start-stop and end cue points in a track.
i unchecked the public server option. it does not advertise to any streaming directories. it is mainly there for the enjoyment of family and friends and for all intents and purposes is not public.
I am going to try out Zararadio 1.4.4 that allows winamp plugins after I get a few radio station ids made.
The good thing about ZaraRadio is that it is easy to get up and running. I have it on a backup laptop for that moment I need to go off line with the main laptop that runs RadioDJ.
You won't go wrong that way either! Keep us posted..
Craig
Jacksboro Radio Network (JRN) <<that makes it official