Stereo Tool

I am a recent college graduate who has yet to build a house. I have purchased all of my audio equipment for my multi-zone audio once I do (which will be mounted in a wiring closet, and controlled with an ELan system), except zonal amplifiers and audio processors (to control dynamics for the selected source). I was stuck between a few, fairly costly solutions.

Well, with Stereo Tool, I can offload audio processing to my rack mounted media and control server, and install multiple sound cards for the two zones. I will create presets based on the dynamic needs of the zones accordingly. From there, the rest is history. I will effectively save 20W times two in energy for using software over hardware (minus whatever the two audio cards take), save space in my rack to allow better cooling, and save money on hardware as I will not have to purchase it.

The only thing I could ask for in the standalone version is better handling of multiple instances. It seems that I will have to choose my sound cards each time I start them up? It would be nice to be able to save that per instance. Or can I do this by simply installing Stereo Tool standalone in multiple locations?

Thank you very much for all that you do. You've given me a reason to set up a PayPal account! Once that is set up, expect something nice.

Thanks again!!!

Hi SuperH,

I guess it would be a good idea to add support of separate Stereo Tool installations...

But there is a trick to get separate installations working. Stereo Tool reads and writes its settings to a file located in the path set in the enviroment variable USERPROFILE.

So, create a .cmd file for every Stereo Tool instance you need, as follows:

set USERPROFILE="C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Stereo Tool - Instance 1"
md %USERPROFILE% 2> NUL
StereoTool.exe

Of course you can set another path if you like. Just make sure to specify a directory that Stereo Tool can write to. (The md 2> NULL line creates the directory if it doesn't exist, without showing an error message.)

Note: The command window does not automatically disappear... You have to close it manually. I don't know if there's an easy way of solving that. Unfortunately it looks like there's no way of setting an environment variable in a shortcut. You could let the command window start up minimized.