In that case, just find a cheap monitor (I'm sure someone from the congregation would donate one, even an old small one that works but they'd have to pay to throw away.) But I guess there's no space for that?
VNC is free.
On 4/20/06, azinck3 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
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
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