[linux-audio-user] live recording event advice

[Dmitry Baikov]

Hi!
Once I recorded a concert (which I also took part in) for about 2.5
hours long. It was not that long session you plan to try, though :)
But I have some ideas to share.

0) computer is definitely OK for your task.

1) Audio card. I don't know, may be that computer is lucky enough to
get good on board sound. But 3 of them I met in person, were simply
horrible.
If you spend about $100 you can buy M-Audio Audiophile 2496.
You will have dramatically better audio quality. I'd even say that
only from here you can call it "a quality". Btw, it has RCA
inputs/outputs (and an S/PDIF).

2) If Audacity needs fixed recording time, I'd sugest another way:

I used excellent timemachine by Steve Harris (
http://plugin.org.uk/timemachine/ )
The plus side of it, it just records, from one button push, to
another. No need to set up recording time. Just make sure you have
enough disk space.
On the minus side, you have to install jack for it. But for recording
you don't need low latency, so no special kernel tuning is required.
Just set up maximum buffer size (4096 samples?) and go :)
Another "minus" is that it records 24-bit WAV files (WAV64 exactly, to
overcome 2GB file limit of normal WAV files). But you can later edit
and compress it to OGG if you wish. As a bonus you will have greater
audio quality in a source material.

So, on the software side I'd recommend
1) jackd + qjackctl
2) timemachine
and for post processing I used
3) mhwaveedit.
I don't know if audacity can read WAV64 files. But if the recording
session will fit into 2GB, timemachine has an option to write common
WAV files.

Hope it'll help a bit.

Regards,
Dmitry.