One in a series about the winners of Radio World’s “Cool Stuff” Award.
Our judges were happy to see MPEG-4 aacPlus as well as AAC in this encoding software for streaming audio. The selling point here is that netcasters can have good sound at economical bit rates. At 32 kbps, the software streams close to FM quality; and “many listeners prefer the audio quality of 48 kbps streams to FM,” Orban says.
Stations encoded with Opticodec-PC can be heard through the new RealPlayer 10 and can list themselves on www.opticodec.net, a directory service for Opticodec-PC streams.
This is available for Windows 2000/XP and supplies streams compatible with the Darwin Streaming Server. It comes in a $99 LE version, which is compatible with good sound cards and which encodes one stream at bit rates of 8 to 32 kbps; and a $1,995 PE version, a premium package that comes with an Optimod-PC and can encode multiple streams at 8 to 320 kbps. The Optimod-PC provides professional broadcast audio processing and includes mixing functions and other features.
Retail price: PE version with Optimod PC-1100 stereo audio processor, $1,995; PE version for an existing Optimod-PC 1100, $495; LE version, $99.
Info: (510) 351-3500 in California or www.orban.com.
