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Processor | Pentium II, Pentium III or Athlon with 400 MHz or faster |
RAM | 64 MBytes or more |
Sound Card | SoundBlaster Live or other brand name card |
Operating System | Windows 2000 with Service Pack 1 |
Additional Software | Windows Media Player 7.0 |
To avoid probems with corrupt or non-standard MP3 files, it is strongly recommended that you always use the same encoder software and the same settings to encode your files. Using Windows Media Player 10 you can rip CD tracks and save them to MP3 files. It's very easy to use and completely free.
Make sure that you always use a constant bitrate. Raduga can play MP3 files with variable bitrate, but sometimes it cannot determine the correct duration. This may cause incorrect overlaps. The best bitrate depends on the required quality of your output signal. For AM stations or Internet broadcast a bitrate of 128 kbit/sec should be sufficient. High quality FM stations will want to use 192 kbit/sec or better.
Some encoders have an option called "enable CRC check" or "include checksum data". Do not enable this option, otherwise Raduga cannot play back these files.
If you use the LAME encoder, specify the option --strictly-enforce-ISO. MP3 files that have been encoded without this option at a bitrate of 256 kbit/s will play in Raduga without sound until you move the position slider.
For the pre-listen feature to work, your computer must have 2 sound cards or a sound card with 2 independent output channels. You can then use the second sound card to listen to tracks with headphones without having to broadcast them.
Now select a song from the playlist and choose 'Pre-Listen' from the 'Tools' menu.
Voice tracking can be achieved by using special mini-playlists. You create a mini playlist that contains a song and the corresponding voice track that you want to overlap with this song. Depending on the characteristics of the fade, the voice track can be placed at the beginning or at the end of the mini playlist. For the example below we assume a voice recording with a duration of 10 seconds and the default overlap period is set to 5 seconds.
Playlist contents | Contents of song2.mpl | |
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Example 1![]() |
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Example 2![]() |
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The fade can be fine-tuned by specifying individual overlap times on all songs as well as on the mini-playlist, for example by renaming the mini-playlist to song2~2.mpl you will reduce the overlap time at the end of the mini playlist to 2 seconds.
When you have problems with overlaps, then your machine probably uses the wrong MP3 decoder. Only the Fraunhofer MPEG Layer-3 decoder allows smooth overlaps. This decoder is installed by default on every Windows 2000 or XP system.
You can use the DSPlay diagnose tool to find out which codecs are used by Raduga. The list of filters should be similar to this screenshot:
If you see a different MP3 decoder here, you should remove the other codec by uninstalling the application which installed the codec.
There are some DirectX plug-ins that don't work correctly during overlaps, Try to remove all DirectX plug-ins from Raduga to eliminate this possible source of the problem. Also an update of the sound card drivers can help.
To play .OGG files with Raduga you must install the OggDS DirectShow filters.
When you install the
K-Lite
codec pack from
free-codecs.com
you will be able to play MP4 files.
This tip was provided by André Depré (Radio Tienen).