ZaraStudio is an application designed to automate radio stations, though its features make it useful too for supermarkets, shops, coffees...

Random music styles, fades and automatic overlaps between songs based on sound level, DTMF tones detection without additional hardware, remote control through the parallel port, a complete events system, four aux players and handling up to six sound cards simultaneously are some of the features that have made it a very popular solution in lots of stations around the world.

The purpose of this project is making your favourite audio editing tool into powerful live audio processor. In my case I use Sonar 3 Producer Edition, it is old software but work fine and low computer and resource requirements. Now they launch ver. 7.  Thanks to Eugene V. Muzychenko for his Virtual Audio Cable and Michael Tippach for his ASIO4ALL, because of their software I can make low latency digital audio processor. The latency is about 30 ms, this is almost unhearable delay.

The Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) software implements an idea of a physical interconnection cable applied to Windows audio applications(example : Stereo Coder + RDS). Like traditional audio devices (CD Player, FM receiver, equalizer, amplifier etc.) are connected by the electric (analog or digital) cables, Windows audio applications can be connected together by the Virtual Cables created by the VAC.

Setting up your audio software

In order to make use of ASIO4ALL, you need to configure your audio software accordingly. How you would do this depends on your particular application. Generally, you would always enter the audio configuration menu and select ASIO -> ASIO4ALL v2.

This project makes it possible to use a “normal” soundcard to generate a stereo signal for FM radio transmitters. The stereo coder is a simple application that runs with Windows XP with service pack 1 or higher.Airomate makes it possible to use a 192 kHz sampling rate capable soundcard to generate a high quality stereo MPX signal with full featured RDS/RBDS for FM radio transmitters. Airomate gives your radio station the professional look and sound.The maximum frequency of a MPX stereo / RDS signal goes up to 57 kHz. So you need a soundcard that can handle a minimum frequency of 57 kHz. Nowadays there are cheap soundcards which have a samplerate of 192 kHz. These soundcards can produce frequencies up to 96 kHz. For a frequency of 96 kHz you will need a minimum samplerate of 192 kHz. Most operating systems can not handle a samplerate of 192 kHz. Windows XP WITH Service pack 1 is the first Windows version which can handle this.

New audio dsp/dx plugin for FM broadcasting has come. Sonos and MBL4 are dx plugin with AGC, Compressor, Limiter, Clipper and 8 kHz, 10 kHz, 16 KHz Low Pass Filter. So it is very suitable for FM and AM audio processor.