If you are trying to run a web radio station then there are a few things you need to ensure. One of these is that you are broadcasting the best quality sound that you can. To acheive this you must ‘master’ the audio content before it is encoded. This mastering ensures your stream uses all the dynamic range it can. If you have ever wondered why your station doesn’t sound very loud or punchy against pro stations then this is why.

Mastering can envolve some very complex audio processing however the main parts are much simpler and here we tell you how you can do it for free!

If you are broadcasting using winamp using the SHOUtcast dsp then you are definately in luck. While there are a few multiband or mastering plugins avaiable in our experience there is one above all others. It is called ‘Stereo Tool’ and features multi band compression, 10 band eq, stereo enhancer, dual band limiter and a maximiser to really squeeze that last bit out of the stream volume (dymanic range). Even better the features that you have to pay for are not needed for web radio so you get this excellent quality tool for free!

One thing to note is that this is a DSP and winamp only lets you run one DSP at a time. The SHOUTcast encoder is a DSP so you need a way around this. Thanks to the guys at Spacial who have developed a DSP stacker allowing you to run both at the same time.

If you are already running the SHOUTcast DSP then get the DSP Stacker install it then get the Stereo Tool intall that as well then in winamp select the DSP Stacker as the DSP you want to use instead of the SHOUTcast DSP. Now get in the stacker add the SHOUTcast DSP and the Stereo Tool in that order. You can now use both together. You will find on the Stereo Tool that it has some default settings. One of these is called ‘web radio’ try this to begin with and you can then start experimenting.