our Tx has a stereo digitial endoder. i built the system and the decsion to use hardware was easy. if i reboot the pc a cd player can keep a song on air till pc comes back up about 45 sec.
what i need is rds, but from what i understand it has to be injected after the mulitplexing is done. there is another software stereo encoder with rds out there. i tested with it. i works ok but can be picky about sound cards. I use m-audio delta 66 for the extra channels and hardware router it comes with. it routes music even when the pc is rebooting. very nice for FM.
my listeners love the improvement in sound this week! the settings i am using really help on low bitrate encodings. if my entire catolog was 320k mp3 i could really punch but i started song collecting before the station has even an idea. so about half of my songs are lower bitrate. some have asked me if i pulled them as the sound is much more even now.
we stream in acc+ and ibelive we have the best stream of all the stations here. clearchannel now has their stations streaming and its sad to hear them at crappy encoding
looks like i am going to stand alone a dsp pc for the mics. sam has to much delay to listen to the air as you talk.
keep up the work. if i can get some spare change i'll get a donation to ya.