Emulate A Radio Station At Home With Sound Byte

Ask any veteran radio broadcaster about equipment used back in the heyday and they’ll tell you about cart machines. Cart machines, which replaced reel-to-reel machines, played tape cartridges which were used to hold and play a collection of commercials, jingles, announcements and other audio.

In the digital world, Sound Byte from Black Cat Software will emulate a cart machine right on your Mac. The cross-platform virtual cart machine is available in three flavors: Sound Byte Lite, Sound Byte and Sound Byte Pro. The difference between the three, besides price, is the amount of racks you can have. Each rack contains 75 carts that you can load up with any audio. The Lite version comes with one rack, regular comes with five and pro comes with 50 for up to 3,750 carts.

One of my favorite things about Sound Byte is it’s simplicity. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping your audio file on a cart in your rack and when you click on it, it plays. Click on it again and it stops. You can even overlap audio by starting one when another is already playing.

But overall, my favorite feature of Sound Byte is assigning carts to a key. As a podcaster producing a weekly show, I have begun using Sound Byte to cue up different audio elements including show intros and outros, promos, sweepers and any clips extracted from the web or radio. I assign each cart to a number on my keyboard in order of when it will be played on my show, so I can cue up the show intro by pressing the number one and so on.

I have tried several other applications for cueing up music including DJ-1800, separate Quicktime windows and even iTunes and none do quite the job that Sound Byte does.

Below is a list of other uses for Sound Byte:

• Radio Stations - jingles, advertisements, PSAs, songs, announcements, and more.
• Plays and radio/TV productions - perfect for playing sound effects.
• Sports events - play sound effects when a team scores, etc.
• Music collections - organize and easily play your songs.
• Ham radio - use for generating CQ calls, for contesting etc.

Sound Byte supports aiff, wav, au, mp3, aac and m4a audio formats and starts at $24 for the lite version. You can download a trial copy of Sound Byte to test out for yourself at Black Cat Systems