This is potentially quite off-topic, but I need ideas and this is a very active board full of intelligent people ;) with lots of varied experience. So read-on if you have any experience in pro audio or are otherwise interested in helping me!
I'm looking for what amounts to a "slim" recording device for professional audio applications. My church records our service every week on a computer (we simply pull a mono feed from an aux send on our mixer straight into the PC sound card) for easy distribution via the internet and CDs. Due to space/budget constraints, 2 computers (one for graphics/powerpoint, one for recording) share a single monitor via a kvm switch. During the service the graphics computer needs to be used almost exclusively. This makes it very difficult to monitor the recording levels on the recording computer during the service and inexperienced operators (or even experienced ones) often end up with recordings that are either driven well into clipping, or are too quiet, at least in parts. The widely varying weekly setup (different sound engineers, different bands, etc.) complicates things. A proper setup would include a separate recording mixer, compressors, etc...we don't have the budget for that. With what we have we're obviously not looking for a studio-grade recording, just listenable, undistorted sound. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good way to accomplish what we're trying to do? I'd love to hear about hardware or software or any other techniques that you may have used or have heard of that would help us out. Optimally the hardware should cost <$500. I've spent a good deal of time thinking about this myself. After much consideration, what I think would be optimal would be a simple hardware box with balanced audio inputs, transport controls with an LCD display for device status/settings, and a VU meter. The device would sit on a network, or connect to a computer via USB or firewire and use the computer for storage. The computer would simply have some sort of service installed (running in the background) that would perform the functions required by the hardware. This would include things like creating and saving the audio files, etc. For example, every time you'd hit record a new file would be created in some directory on the pc, then closed out and saved when recording was stopped--all transparently. The PC should just sit there and dumbly accept data. This would prevent you from ever having to look at the PC. In fact, if this were implemented via ethernet the PC could be locked away in a closet somewhere. In effect, the hardware would look and act very much like a stand-alone CD-recorder, or even a tape deck, but in the end there'd be a file sitting on a PC somewhere, which is emminently more useful to me in my application than any other sort of media. Now, I'm quite aware that there a number of devices that are similar to what I'm describing. I'll quickly outline them below and why I find them less-than-ideal: USB and Firewire audio interfaces (with MIDI-based DAW control): There are many of these out there the likes of edirol, m-audio, tascam, and many others. Virtually all of these, however, lack transport controls, decent VU meters (most just have clipping LEDs), and all of them, of course, rely upon relatively complex PC-based software for the actual recording task (optimally, our Sunday-morning operators shouldn't really even have to create a new audio file with the right recording parameters, etc.--I just want them to hit record). And the devices that do happen to add transport controls and decent VU meters are much more complex devices in themselves. They have many more features for mixing and recording--these make it too easy for a novice to screw up when all you want is a straight recording. Those features also add cost. There are also multi-track hard-disk recorders (a la Mackie and Alesis): Overkill for our needs and relatively pricey. Lastly, there are small, portable hard-drive recorders: These could potentially work for our purposes, but they, too, tend to have poor VU meters and the extra step of getting the recording off the device seems unnecessary. Besides, their form-factor is less than ideal for a fixed installation. So (for those of you who are still with me at this point)...any thoughts? Ideas? Something glaring I've missed? I keep thinking there must be a device like this out there somewhere... -- azinck3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ azinck3's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3967 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23154 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
