[linux-audio-user] voicemail?

[M P Smoak]

I'm working with a professor who uses telephone interviews and conference 
calls in her research and teaching.  Her phd research used telephone 
interviews with recording to cassette tape, transciption to ascii files
and manual condensation of results using a powerful ascii editor and 
some neat statistical and network analysis programs.  

In my work I use telephone in similar ways.  In both cases, phone calls
are data.  In both cases, the calls are usually "team interactions"
and often the team wants to keep minutes of the meeting.

Right now we have need to replace the tape recorder with a linux recorder.
So I've hooked-up the old RadioShack adapter to mic in for the SBlive and
have experimented with reZound (ver 0.11.1beta), one channel using qamix.
And it works;  a 10 minute .rez file is about 100 meg, a shows an large
difference in loudness between the local and remote callers, as expected.
This difference can be reduced by using rezounds "adaptive normalize" tool
(under the Normalize menu) with NL = -20dBFS, WT = 205ms and MG = 25dB. The
resulting file is very useful (good enough). 

But it's too big.  Saving it as a .ogg file with quality = 4 gets it down
to about 5 meg, I think.  So the question is what's a good way to shrink 
it down?  And how small can I get it, assumeing a 100 meg .rez file?  And
what type file will it be that is easily platform independent, so that
all team members will keep (or have access to) a copy for their records?
Small is better for attaching to email, ie voicemail.

Once we get this working, I imagine that we will do manual editing using
both audio and ascii editors.  reZound and Kate are looking real good to
me.  

I'd also like to get any thoughts you have on uses of audio records for
collabrative teams in general.  Soon I'll have a wiki page on this topic.
It's working now, but not yet online.  Hopefully it will allow some
input with no registration required.  I'll also be interested in a page
for folks who are using linux audio mainly for improving their playing.
Perhaps a "collabrative performance-improvement team" page with a link
to The Rules for Working in Ensembles:
 http://amherstsaxophonequartet.buffalo.edu/TandT/Rules4ensembles.htm

Thanks for listening,
Marv