Free broadcast encoder for Windows
A full deck when you need it. A thin strip when you don't.
Deck puts your microphone on an Icecast or SHOUTcast server, with the meter, the mixer, the recorder and every destination on one screen. Everything is unlocked. There is no account.
Mini mode
Then it gets out of the way.
Press Mini and Deck becomes a 56-pixel bar that stays on top of your other windows: whose strip it is, whether you're on air and who's listening, the meter, where it's going, record, and the way back. Nothing else — and no route to a setting, because during a show you shouldn't need one.
It's remembered between runs. Parking it along the top of a screen is a way of working, not a passing choice.
What it does
Everything a station needs, on the first screen or one press away.
Sound in
Any Windows input or ASIO interface, a second fader for music under your voice, and capture from a single program — so the backing-track player goes out and your notifications don't. Voice enhance, automatic levels, bass/middle/treble, a preset compressor, and a limiter that is always on.
Sound out
Icecast and SHOUTcast v1 and v2, over TLS. MP3, Ogg Opus, Ogg Vorbis and lossless FLAC from 32 to 320 kbps. Several servers at once — a main and a backup relay, or the same show at two bitrates — and one of them dropping does not take the others off air.
Knowing it's working
A segmented meter that tells you where to sit rather than just how loud you are, loudness measured against broadcast targets, live listener counts, and a six-stage connection test that says which stage failed in words rather than returning a code.
Now playing
Type a title on the deck and Deck remembers it until you change it. Or read the file your playout software writes, follow whatever Windows is playing, or take titles over a local endpoint your automation can post to — including the Icecast admin form, unchanged.
Recording
While you broadcast or on its own, in the stream's format, lossless FLAC or WAV. Filename templates, automatic splitting by duration, and it stops itself before the disk fills rather than after.
Hands off
Global hotkeys, a MIDI controller assigned by pressing Learn and moving the fader, a local endpoint and command line other programs can drive, and automatic on-air when sound appears.
Make it yours
Seven palettes, and every one of them drawn twice.
Deck follows Windows into light and dark, so a palette that only existed in one of them would simply not appear for half the people who chose it. Which colours and how bright are two separate settings, and picking a palette never overrules what you told Windows about your eyes or your room.
Every colour is measured rather than judged — text, hints, rail labels and the meter, against the contrast standard, on all fourteen faces. It is not decoration: this is a window that sits open for the length of a show.
Every picture below is a photograph of the deck on air, one per palette. Open any of them to see it full size.
Free. Unhobbled. No account.
The features other encoders charge for are the ones this exists to give away.
The commercial encoder this was built to answer puts multi-server streaming, SSL and fast reconnect behind a licence. Those are not premium features. They are what stops a show going off air, and a station that cannot afford a licence is exactly the station that needs them.
So there is no paid tier, no bitrate cap, no watermark, no account, and no telemetry. Deck is licensed under the GPL v3 — copyleft on purpose, so nobody can take this work, close it, and sell back the tiers it was written to make unnecessary. The update check is opt-in and never installs anything on its own.
Download
One file, and nothing else to install.
Installer
Per-user, so it needs no administrator rights. Updates itself in place if you let it.
Deck setup for Windows →Portable
Unzip and run. Keeps its settings beside itself, so it lives happily on a USB stick.
Portable zip →Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. No .NET runtime needed — it is in the download. Capturing a single program needs Windows build 20348 or later; below that Deck does not offer it rather than failing when you go on air.
Windows will warn that it does not recognise the program, because these builds are not code-signed. Every release publishes SHA-256 checksums, and the built-in updater verifies them for itself and refuses anything that does not match.