Stereo Tool

Hello there,

Installed Stereo tool this evening and its a beautiful piece of software, well done!

Using the winamp version and feeding it out to an FM transmitter. Only problem Im having is that when I enable direct soundcard access, it stops the winamp crossfade function so my tracks dont overlap anymore. They play away but then have to play all the way out before the next one starts.

Help?

Pete

Welcome Dubpete,

There is not an easy fix for this... Winamp doesn't notify plug-ins in time that a new song is starting (in fact, it sends the event about one second later). So there's no way of knowing when cross-fading would be needed.

Depending on what you want and how difficult you want to make it, there is a solution though: Use Winamp without Stereo Tool, use the stand alone Stereo Tool version to process the output. But if you do that, you need to find a way of feeding the Winamp output into Stereo Tool.

If your sound card supports it, you might be able to forward audio output from one program into another (for example some ESI sound cards have this option). If not, you can use a program Virtual Audio Cable (costs $20) to do this. Or, if you have multiple sound cards, you can capture the output of one and use the other for the Stereo Tool output.

Alternatively, you could replace Winamp by a radio automation program such as SAM4 or RadioBOSS - but they are quite expensive. The advantage of this is that these programs do the cross-fading before feeding the result into any plugins. And you can easily add jingles and sound effects

Note: There might be other programs (other Winamp DSP plugin compatible players) that do the cross fading themselves, if you find any please let me know...

Thanks very much for that.

I can run Zararadio or Raduga to look after the crossfades for me. How can I get the standalone version of Stereotool to recognize the output of Zara or Raduga as the input to Stereotool (and obviously back out into the card and in to the FM transmitter).

Or can I use another plugin in Winamp to take the line in and then feed that to Stereotool (the winamp plugin version)/

Will I need to use the virtual audio cable option to do the feeds and then use that as an option in "configure sound cards". Im running XP.

Thanks again for your help.

Pete

Well, you can use Virtual Audio Cable for that. With VAC, you can create a "fake" sound card, let Zararadio or Raduga play to that sound card, and in Stereo Tool configure it as the input sound card. Alternatively, if those programs offer other output formats (for example streaming audio like ShoutCast) you could use that and use Winamp to play back the stream - and process it with Stereo Tool.
There is a LineIn plugin for Winamp with which you can read the line-in input. Using that is identical to using the stand alone version of Stereo Tool. So if you have a way of getting the audio to the line in, you can use the stand alone version as I described in my previous post.
Yes, just select "Virtual Audio Cable" as playback device in your cross-fading player, and "Virtual Audio Cable" as input device in Stereo Tool.

Hello again,

That worked out just fine thank you! Im using ZaraRadio for playout and working with that virtual cable to send the feed to the card and away we go from there.

Excellent little piece of software, going to test it overnight and register it tomorrow. Thanks again.

Pete

Sincere apologies for bumping a 7 year old thread, but is there any updated fix for this? CPU and ram is an issue so I'd rather just have everything working in one.

Not that I know of - but I could be wrong. You would need a Winamp input plugin that supports crossfading instead of an output plugin (ask in a Winamp forum). Or another program which natively supports it (such as all the broadcast programs that I know of) and supports Winamp plugins.

CPU load should not be affected much by this setup btw. You can use the free VB Cable or paid VAC to connect Winamp to the stand alone version of Stereo Tool.

This is not something that can be fixed inside Stereo Tool, also, Winamp is only one of hundreds of programs that supports Winamp plugins so it wouldn't be a very good idea to implement too many Winamp-specific things...

Actually you can use output plugin called sqrsoft advanced crossfading. It has a unique feature in which you can set DSP plugin - directly within this particular sound-out plug-in. I also found it to be MUCH better than the default DirectSound crossfader built-in Winamp itself. The only trade-off is that it will cause you trouble with some sample rates. Since I'm using 44.1 kHz only for all of my files, it's not much of an issue.



However, personally I still prefer using stand-alone version of ST, connected to Winamp via VB-Audio Virtual Cable (which is completely freeware, BTW).



Just make sure you set up sample rates correctly in Win7.

Thanks for that, Slawomir.

I tried the 1.7.6 version of it as it was the only one I could find, and stereo tool did not like it at all, haha.
Started off with just skipping, heaps of errors in stereo tool and then winamp crashed. Think I might actually just used the standalone version of stereo tool.

Yeah, this plug-in is tricky and not fully compatible with newer versions of Winamp. I use it with a good old 5.05.
But as you said, it would be much easier to go just with stand alone instead