Ask Slashdot: Recording Business Meeting Audio On an Intranet? 85
dousette writes "I have been tasked with modernizing our company's board room. Replacing the overhead projector with a more modern LCD projector is a no-brainer, speakers are easy enough to wire off of the HDMI projector, but one of the requirements that has me stumped is the recording of minutes. The existing system uses wired microphones connected to a cassette player, and what I would love to replace this with are some sort of Ethernet microphone that could stream directly to a Windows file share. Does such an animal exist? Do you have any other suggestions for the room that I might be missing?" So if you wanted to bypass a stand-alone system, how would you go about dumping audio straight to your network?
if you want it on a torrent, yeah, go for it (Score:4, Insightful)
because if it's on a machine accessable to The Connected Internet, and anybody who wants to punk or bleed you wants it, they'll find a way to it.
there's still such a thing as a microcassette recorder, and such a thing as a digital recorder, that you can start, set next to the conferencing phone, and have a clerk type up. not all technology needs to migrate to the cloud by 5 pm today.
Re:Who takes the minutes? (Score:4, Insightful)
The auto-transcribed document wouldn't be able to identify who is speaking at any given time.
Components (Score:2, Insightful)
For video, I am using an Optoma ML500. I would not use any other laser or lcd projector at this point.
For audio, I use an Olympus digital recorder on a rubber pad. It can record many hours of audio before it fills up. It shows up as a USB stick when you plug it in, and is compatible with Linux. Then, I use Audacity to remove noise, and the quality is really great. Sony has a nice recorder too, but I won't do business with them after the GeoHot fiasco.
Recording to a server is a possiblity, and I use it with WebEx, but I would not install it in a room. I would not have a room based setup for direct recording for two reasons; portability and security. Imagine a situation where someone starts an unauthorized (and possibly illegal) recording. Or, perhaps, they access a previous recording on a network share. Maybe someone forgot to stop recording and the party that uses the room next does not know that it is on. This could sink a company.
IANAL, but like to make sure that I record consent from all parties before continuing, and provide a copy to all parties upon conclusion. You may have to consult your lawyer before implementation.