Interactive Marketing

SAM Broadcaster has forever been the number 1 player when it comes to broadcasting your own radio show! But at around $279 its not cheap and for many not even close to being worth the money!

Spacial Audio who own SAM Broadcaster have tried to come up with various products that can save us money. But have been nothing short of a complete failure to see the users needs, but lets just look into the products anyway...

Simplecast is free and very simple to setup, although you need to find a good 3rd party software you can play your tracks and do your voice overs from...

Recently they released Easycast which is a program designed for people who didn't take 10 minuets to read a simple article on how to configure an encoder, and seriously that is about their only unique selling point. Again it works in pretty much the same way simple cast does only all you need to do is login with you info and it will connect you to your server by the way did i mention you have to buy their servers which cost $99 a month!! That's not cheap Hey at least the software is free!

Ok so i think we have established that spacial audio are going to break your bank but if you can afford it go with SAM Broadcaster but that's not what this article is about right Lets get serious now!

Winamp and the shoutcast DSP plugin which I'm not going to explain how to setup because there is a million websites telling you how and you all know how to use a search engine right ANYWAY! This is a great bit of free software and works as a nice general media player too. I started out my Internet Radio life using winamp and loved it! Its simple to use and all you do is drag and drop your media and away you go! But again this can be clunky if you want to live voiceover your songs!

Our next program isn't cheap sorry but needs a mention Virtual DJ is a great tool and brilliant if your more of a mixing DJ which lets be honest is almost impossible in SAM Broadcaster! There are so many plugins, effects and controls you can add to this to customise it to your DJ style and it streams to online servers! Ok I agree this will cost you the same amount as SAM Broadcaster does but if you love mixing check out the 20day trial!

Now time for some more free stuff and this one is named BUTT (Broadcast Using this Tool) and its totally free and it works on Mac Os and Linux oooooooooooo cross platform! About time! again its much similar to simplecast so you'll have to find yourself a good media player and a way to fade in and out microphones but plenty of software does that today anyway!

Im going to leave you with one final bit of software now! Its called Mixxx its like a very strong watered down virtual Dj but its free! It comes with multi channel, Vinyl emulation, Cross-platform (Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X, Linux) and multiple soundcard support! As far as i am aware it doesn't support internet radio broadcasting but just use a program like BUTT or Simplecast to get it on the air!

If you want more advice on which software to use for your budget or want help on starting your own internet radio station. Come down to Internet Radio Forum and we will be happy to help. Link in source