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?
Mini-PC and pulseaudio (Score:4, Interesting)
Who takes the minutes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you just dump the audio archives somewhere for hypothetical later retrieval (which isn't really "minutes"), or is somebody tasked with creating the actual minutes from the recordings after the meeting? Having a person writing up the minutes as the meeting progresses is generally a better idea in my experience. Then it's just normal document editing.
Re:Mini-PC and pulseaudio (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as I know, you could put a linux-box there with pulseaudio and make the input device network-available. You could record then with any pulseaudio-system anywhere.
This, this, this.
Raspberry Pi, anyone?
Re:Mini-PC and pulseaudio (Score:5, Interesting)
Careful, you might not want the boardroom audio available to all.
The safest path might be to replace the tape deck with a solid state recorder with removable storage. I've hooked ours up to an iPod in the past.
Re:Mini-PC and pulseaudio (Score:4, Interesting)
Careful, you might not want the boardroom audio available to all.
The safest path might be to replace the tape deck with a solid state recorder with removable storage. I've hooked ours up to an iPod in the past.
This. I would suggest keeping the Mics (they probably have good placement and superior audio) and feeding them into a small digital recorder that someone has the responsibility of starting/stopping/uploading. This way only the activity that is supposed to be recorded, retransmitted, etc. is actually done since a human needs to handle the movement of the information. Try to automate it and get it wrong (even on accident,) and you could find yourself looking for a new job at best, and looking out from a jail cell at worst.
My first thought was some sort of remote-controlled mic system that took cues from an Exchange server managing meeting resource events. That way the file would automatically be generated for each meeting that was scheduled, and saved accordingly. That would be awesome until someone scheduled an off the record meeting and found out only later that the whole thing was recorded and stashed on the intranet where who knows who has access to it.