Last weekend was my first experience with RadioCaster, and I do have to say that I'm extremely happy with the program. I'll be putting my wallet behind that statement later today most likely.
A friend and I started a podcast a while back on the station I run, and it was harder than I thought to find a nice simple program to stream out the mixdown of both of us talking to each other on Skype for the live listeners. Spacial Audio has their SimpleCast program that looks like it could do what I needed, but a $200 price tag on it is just completely past ridiculous to me. I've spent a lot of money with them over the years, upgrading from SAM2 to SAM3, and then getting a 5 seat DJ license, but for the most part, the only thing I've seen from each upgrade I make is more and more bloated software. In my mind, there's simply no reason that SAM3 should require the kind of machine it does just to run audio and crossfades without stuttering. With that in mind, there was just absolutely no way I was going to drop another couple hundred dollars their way for something that I don't think should cost any more than $50.
Trying to find another route, I stumbled on an old version of Edcast that seemed to do the trick. We've been using that for the past 33 weeks, and it seems to handle the job alright, but it's always felt a little buggy to me, especially since the volume bars never actually move while we're broadcasting. Add to that the fact that it's a discontinued product, and I've still been keeping my eye out for something else.
Last week I managed to stumble on a reference to RadioBoss, so I looked it up out of curiosity and was very pleased to discover your RadioCaster program. The thing feels small and lightweight, doesn't seem to eat up resources over the course of a two hour live broadcast, and the volume bars actually move while we're streaming (a small feature, I know, but it's very useful to me so that I can spot when I've accidentally pumped our mixdown to the wrong VAC line, or to spot when I've only got one side of the conversation streaming).
About the only thing I feel like I'm missing from it is some kind of stats graph over time that included the ability to watch multiple streams at once, even when they might not be the one I'm broadcasting to. This way, if I'm doing audio transcoding on the server end to make a dial-up stream, I can watch the listener counts for that stream and the broadband stream in one easy spot. Ideally, I could also leave the program open to watch those stats graphs when we weren't live streaming, just to keep an eye on things and spot massive listener drops.
That's just my two cents though.
(P.S. It would cost me $100 to go from SAM3 to SAM4, but if RadioBOSS had some kind of incentive program to undercut that cost to get people like me to switch, I'd be giving it a really serious amount of consideration.)
A friend and I started a podcast a while back on the station I run, and it was harder than I thought to find a nice simple program to stream out the mixdown of both of us talking to each other on Skype for the live listeners. Spacial Audio has their SimpleCast program that looks like it could do what I needed, but a $200 price tag on it is just completely past ridiculous to me. I've spent a lot of money with them over the years, upgrading from SAM2 to SAM3, and then getting a 5 seat DJ license, but for the most part, the only thing I've seen from each upgrade I make is more and more bloated software. In my mind, there's simply no reason that SAM3 should require the kind of machine it does just to run audio and crossfades without stuttering. With that in mind, there was just absolutely no way I was going to drop another couple hundred dollars their way for something that I don't think should cost any more than $50.
Trying to find another route, I stumbled on an old version of Edcast that seemed to do the trick. We've been using that for the past 33 weeks, and it seems to handle the job alright, but it's always felt a little buggy to me, especially since the volume bars never actually move while we're broadcasting. Add to that the fact that it's a discontinued product, and I've still been keeping my eye out for something else.
Last week I managed to stumble on a reference to RadioBoss, so I looked it up out of curiosity and was very pleased to discover your RadioCaster program. The thing feels small and lightweight, doesn't seem to eat up resources over the course of a two hour live broadcast, and the volume bars actually move while we're streaming (a small feature, I know, but it's very useful to me so that I can spot when I've accidentally pumped our mixdown to the wrong VAC line, or to spot when I've only got one side of the conversation streaming).
About the only thing I feel like I'm missing from it is some kind of stats graph over time that included the ability to watch multiple streams at once, even when they might not be the one I'm broadcasting to. This way, if I'm doing audio transcoding on the server end to make a dial-up stream, I can watch the listener counts for that stream and the broadband stream in one easy spot. Ideally, I could also leave the program open to watch those stats graphs when we weren't live streaming, just to keep an eye on things and spot massive listener drops.
That's just my two cents though.
(P.S. It would cost me $100 to go from SAM3 to SAM4, but if RadioBOSS had some kind of incentive program to undercut that cost to get people like me to switch, I'd be giving it a really serious amount of consideration.)
