Hi! A bit more about ecasound. You can use it for recording, compressing, DC removal and normalising. You could use it for mp3-encoding, but I'd suggest lame directly. Recording: ecasound -i input -o output -t:time_to_run or: ecasound -c -i input -o output (start/stop interactively, using t and s.) ecasound -i output.wav -o tmp.wav -eli:LADSPA_ID,param1,param2,param3,...,paramN ecafixdc tmp.wav ecanormalize tmp.wav For good lame-options see: lame --longhelp Ideas on the script: make it accept one parameter: something to identify the talk you're recording, number them, take a time and day combination. If you're system's running the hole time, you can use the PID of the script is stored in $$. For readability you might add a line like: PID="$$" And then later use $PID. use simple read statements for the special tagging: read -p "Enter Speakers name: " SPEAKER_NAME read -p "Enter short lecture title: " LECTURE_TITLE Then again use $SPEAKERNAME for later reference. I haven't done quite the same thing, but rather similar ones. If you like this idea and have more questions about some specifics, you can mail me in private. But I guess you'll get something more on that. Kindest regards Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net the Linux TextBased Studio guide ======= AND MY PERSONAL PAGES AT: ======= http://www.juliencoder.de