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?
To the googles! (Score:3, Informative)
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=network+audio+recorder [lmgtfy.com]
I install that solution all the time. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.amazon.com/Marantz-PMD580-Rack-Mount-CompactFlash-Recorder/dp/B0017OM6JQ [amazon.com]
we install them all the time.
And yes it's the only real solution, if they balk at the price, they really dont want to do what you are asking, hook up a Laptop and press record if they are too cheap to buy the real tool for the job.
Write & scan (plus the oblig Raspberry Pi comm (Score:4, Informative)
To get the obligatory Raspberry Pi out of the way: Hook up a microphone to a Raspberry Pi, and have that record/dump onto your local network fileshare.
On a more serious note though, it should be the job of someone in the meeting to take the minutes. It'll all well and good to have an automated system recording audio of the thing for future reference, but it is much better to have someone taking down the key points manually. Not only do you have a backup incase of failure of your system, but you also have a summary with the most important points which is much easier to skim over and extract information from.
If you combine handwritten notes with a document scanner in the room you can have a system to scan, archive and distribute a copy of the minutes almost instantly. Alternatively the minutes could be typed onto a netbook/small laptop and that document emailed round.
Re:Mini-PC and pulseaudio (Score:4, Informative)
Would have suggested that right away but didn't know whether it packs enough bang.
Me either, but I did find a discussion thread where some fellas managed to get pulseaudio running w/ VLC [stackexchange.com] Of course, that's only playback...
Since we're just talking about simple voice recording, surely the hardware requirements would be minimal? I mean, if 12k is good enough for phone conversations...