scott
04-24-2006, 11:28 AM
Greetings,
It is Monday morning, and I have been involved in recording three church services this weekend (1 normal Sunday service plus 2 services from a special conference on Saturday). I have been experimenting with recording setups at our church for the past few months and I finally found a stable setup that we like. So I thought I would share what we are doing in case it would help others.
Here are our goals and assumptions for our system:
Must be easy to make recordings and easy to duplicate recordings.
No more tapes, time to go digital. Tapes are the 8-tracks of the 21st century.
We want the option to eventually Podcast our services from our website.
We want the recordings to sound great.
We want the option of recording any service or Bible Study in just about any location.
Things I tried and don't recommend:
Direct recording to a CD-R : We started with a rack mounted CD-burner. Several problems here. First, the system isn't terribly reliable, even if you using a good burner and good discs. Sometimes the disc would not finalize and you would lose the entire recording of the service. Also, you were limited to an 80 minute recording at best. So longer services and special services would require a disc change in the middle.
Recording to a Laptop : I did this for a few services with decent results, but I would only recommend it if you have an extra computer that does nothing during church. Otherwise, the recording can be interrupted or record gaps if the computer is momentarily overwhelmed by some other program. For instance, some churches have asked about using their projector computer to also make recordings, but the projector software uses a lot a processing power to create the fading transitions between songs. Not recommended.
Mini-Disc Recording : We tried this last year, but it is too difficult and time consuming to get the Mini-Disc recording on to the computer after church to edit and make the master disc for duplication.
Our Current Setup
We finally purchased a MAudio MicroTrack Portable Recorder ($400) along with a 1GB Compact Flash card ($60). This device will take analog signals through 1/4" jacks or from an included microphone. It also has limited phantom power for the mic. It can run on batteries for supposedly 7 hours. It can record WAV files or MP3 at various compression, and the sound quality is unbelievable. I was also surprised to hear good results from the included microphone. With the 1GB card, we can record about 8 hours with high quality compression.
We found we couldn't use the "Tape Out" connectors on our board with this device. Even though our board is balanced and the signal strength is normal on the EQ, the "Tape Out" overpowers the Microtrack (and several other devices we tried). Our Mackie board has several monitor channels, so we are using one of the monitor channels to control the output to the Microtrack. This allows us to setup a special mix for the recording, which is preferable anyway. The main mix is really designed to create the best sound in the room, and will not give the best sound for recording. I know some churches use a seperate mixer just for the recording, but that seems like extra work to me.
We plan on adding an ambient noise mic (also called a room mic) to pick up on extra noises and crowd noise, but we will have to be careful that it only feeds into the Microtrack or we will get some serious feedback.
The Microtrack makes the recording, and then after the service, we unplug it from its power cable (which is also the USB) and plug it into a seperate USB cable connected to our projector computer. We copy the MP3 file onto the hard drive and open the recording using Audacity. We clip off the start and end of the service and add fade in and fade out. We also amplify the preacher to better match the volume of any songs that we include and then output the result to a high quality MP3 file. We also output a second file at lower quality to use on our website. Then we burn a disc from the high quality mp3 and use a CD-duplicator to make copies. With practice, it takes about 15 minutes from pressing the stop button to finishing the first CD.
To make our discs look the best, we pre-print the disc labels on a color laserjet with full-color images that we change every couple of months. Each label includes a boxed white rectangle with space to write the service description using a fine sharpee. (We tried using a portable disc printer from casio, but it was a piece of junk.) We then stick the finished product in a CD-ROM sleeve (100 for $11 from Officemax).
This is the nicest, easiest setup I could devise, and the resulting recordings are excellent and look great to boot. If anyone has any suggestions on improvements, I would love to hear them.
Additional Notes on our Setup
Audacity is free! There are other choices out there, and I suspect that some might be faster, but Audacity does everything we need and has a great interface. You will need to download the LAME mp3 encoder to output from Audacity, and this is also free. It is a little tricky to setup for the first time, but then it works quite well. The mp3 compression is set in Audacity under the Preference screen in the File menu, and Audacity remembers the last compression setting used (which is annoying). You can find Audacity and the LAME encoder through Google or Yahoo!.
The Microtrack sometimes gets confused when first starting. MAudio chose to use the USB cable to power and charge the Microtrack, and when you first start it, it sometimes can't tell whether it is plugged into a computer or not. We have found that unplugging the USB cable from the Microtrack (and sometimes turning it off with the power button) and then plugging it back in will reboot it. We sometimes have to do this for both plugging it into the computer and just starting it up for recording. You cannot record while plugged into the computer. We bought an extra USB-to-MicroUSB cable for the computer and we leave the other cable plugged into our power strip. After a month of use, we have had no other problems than this.
We have tried splitting the tracks but the discs didn't play on many players. We thought it would be a great idea to split the preaching into 5 minute tracks to make it easier to skip around on a recording. We tried burning the discs on multiple computers using multiple disc brands, but we found that the discs would not play in most of the players that we tried. It would work fine if we just created 5 minute tracks, but we wanted the tracks to seemlessly start and end without hesitation. I gave up on making this work for now. It added another 5 minutes of work anyway, and made it harder to train others on making the master recording.
It is Monday morning, and I have been involved in recording three church services this weekend (1 normal Sunday service plus 2 services from a special conference on Saturday). I have been experimenting with recording setups at our church for the past few months and I finally found a stable setup that we like. So I thought I would share what we are doing in case it would help others.
Here are our goals and assumptions for our system:
Must be easy to make recordings and easy to duplicate recordings.
No more tapes, time to go digital. Tapes are the 8-tracks of the 21st century.
We want the option to eventually Podcast our services from our website.
We want the recordings to sound great.
We want the option of recording any service or Bible Study in just about any location.
Things I tried and don't recommend:
Direct recording to a CD-R : We started with a rack mounted CD-burner. Several problems here. First, the system isn't terribly reliable, even if you using a good burner and good discs. Sometimes the disc would not finalize and you would lose the entire recording of the service. Also, you were limited to an 80 minute recording at best. So longer services and special services would require a disc change in the middle.
Recording to a Laptop : I did this for a few services with decent results, but I would only recommend it if you have an extra computer that does nothing during church. Otherwise, the recording can be interrupted or record gaps if the computer is momentarily overwhelmed by some other program. For instance, some churches have asked about using their projector computer to also make recordings, but the projector software uses a lot a processing power to create the fading transitions between songs. Not recommended.
Mini-Disc Recording : We tried this last year, but it is too difficult and time consuming to get the Mini-Disc recording on to the computer after church to edit and make the master disc for duplication.
Our Current Setup
We finally purchased a MAudio MicroTrack Portable Recorder ($400) along with a 1GB Compact Flash card ($60). This device will take analog signals through 1/4" jacks or from an included microphone. It also has limited phantom power for the mic. It can run on batteries for supposedly 7 hours. It can record WAV files or MP3 at various compression, and the sound quality is unbelievable. I was also surprised to hear good results from the included microphone. With the 1GB card, we can record about 8 hours with high quality compression.
We found we couldn't use the "Tape Out" connectors on our board with this device. Even though our board is balanced and the signal strength is normal on the EQ, the "Tape Out" overpowers the Microtrack (and several other devices we tried). Our Mackie board has several monitor channels, so we are using one of the monitor channels to control the output to the Microtrack. This allows us to setup a special mix for the recording, which is preferable anyway. The main mix is really designed to create the best sound in the room, and will not give the best sound for recording. I know some churches use a seperate mixer just for the recording, but that seems like extra work to me.
We plan on adding an ambient noise mic (also called a room mic) to pick up on extra noises and crowd noise, but we will have to be careful that it only feeds into the Microtrack or we will get some serious feedback.
The Microtrack makes the recording, and then after the service, we unplug it from its power cable (which is also the USB) and plug it into a seperate USB cable connected to our projector computer. We copy the MP3 file onto the hard drive and open the recording using Audacity. We clip off the start and end of the service and add fade in and fade out. We also amplify the preacher to better match the volume of any songs that we include and then output the result to a high quality MP3 file. We also output a second file at lower quality to use on our website. Then we burn a disc from the high quality mp3 and use a CD-duplicator to make copies. With practice, it takes about 15 minutes from pressing the stop button to finishing the first CD.
To make our discs look the best, we pre-print the disc labels on a color laserjet with full-color images that we change every couple of months. Each label includes a boxed white rectangle with space to write the service description using a fine sharpee. (We tried using a portable disc printer from casio, but it was a piece of junk.) We then stick the finished product in a CD-ROM sleeve (100 for $11 from Officemax).
This is the nicest, easiest setup I could devise, and the resulting recordings are excellent and look great to boot. If anyone has any suggestions on improvements, I would love to hear them.
Additional Notes on our Setup
Audacity is free! There are other choices out there, and I suspect that some might be faster, but Audacity does everything we need and has a great interface. You will need to download the LAME mp3 encoder to output from Audacity, and this is also free. It is a little tricky to setup for the first time, but then it works quite well. The mp3 compression is set in Audacity under the Preference screen in the File menu, and Audacity remembers the last compression setting used (which is annoying). You can find Audacity and the LAME encoder through Google or Yahoo!.
The Microtrack sometimes gets confused when first starting. MAudio chose to use the USB cable to power and charge the Microtrack, and when you first start it, it sometimes can't tell whether it is plugged into a computer or not. We have found that unplugging the USB cable from the Microtrack (and sometimes turning it off with the power button) and then plugging it back in will reboot it. We sometimes have to do this for both plugging it into the computer and just starting it up for recording. You cannot record while plugged into the computer. We bought an extra USB-to-MicroUSB cable for the computer and we leave the other cable plugged into our power strip. After a month of use, we have had no other problems than this.
We have tried splitting the tracks but the discs didn't play on many players. We thought it would be a great idea to split the preaching into 5 minute tracks to make it easier to skip around on a recording. We tried burning the discs on multiple computers using multiple disc brands, but we found that the discs would not play in most of the players that we tried. It would work fine if we just created 5 minute tracks, but we wanted the tracks to seemlessly start and end without hesitation. I gave up on making this work for now. It added another 5 minutes of work anyway, and made it harder to train others on making the master recording.