Fast production of sermon CD

[scarleton]

We have decided it is time to kick out some high quality audio of the Sunday sermons. My thought is to produce something that starts with some type of bumper music and then goes right into the sermon, and then concludes with bumper music, as well.

In a perfect world, aka constraints I am placing on myself, within 5 minutes of the sermon being over we can be burning CD's of this to hand out to folks.

We currently have a 32 channel board to handle the live mix. My thought process is: Add a Tascam SS-R1 to record the whole service laying down tracks at key points to make post faster. When service is over, move the file to a PC to quickly fine the queue points and clean up the sound, then drop in the bumper music, then burn it to a CD.

Questions:

1. Does that sound like an achievable workflow?
2. Using the Tascam SS-R1, should I be expecting to get nice clean recording or is some type of post process cleanup ALWAYS required to get the best quality?
3. What software do folks recommend for the post production on this? I believe the computer will be a PC, not Mac.

Sam

[Frank DeWitt]

If you are going to move it to a PC anyway, record it using EZTrackerCD click when you want a new track. then use something like I-tunes to burn the two bumpers and your sermon tracks to a master CD. We do this every Sunday. Fast, easy. We skip the last song and it is always done before the song.

Frank

[scarleton]

Frank,

Recording to a PC is not an option, it goes back to that saying: if something can go wrong, it will. As far as recording devices goes, the only option I am willing to consider is something mounted in a rack. Someone suggested a portable MP3 recorder, but that just leaves wires to get bumped and other unknowns.

The most important thing is to talk way with the best possible master, if I cannot make the CD's quickly, then it simply isn't meant to be For the record, we don't have a closing song, so I don't have that time buffer to do a fast production of the CD.

Sam

[Jay M]

I really like the Denon DN-F650R. It's not cheap, but couldn't be easier to use. I have been using one for about 6 months and have been thrilled with the results. It records directly to either SD or USB. I have a few 4 gig USB drives that we use to record each week.

A fast USB stick can be transferred to the PC pretty quickly. I record in 24 bit because I do extensive mastering in Wavelab using Waves and iZotope plugins.

I keep it separate form the house system by using a mic splitter and separate mixer. That gives me a clean recording without house EQ.

If I were content with pretty good, then a Wavelab preset would be all I need to master the sermon. That would take about 5 to 15 minutes depending on the CPU and plugins used.

Burning a CD would take about 5 minutes, then that first master could be placed in a tower to duplicate.

In another situation I use 2 PCs to record the sermon. They are rock solid. After the sermon is finished, I burn the 24-bit wav file to a DVD-R. I the fact that a DVD-R is non-volitle, so I can't accidentally erase the sermon. Another benefit is that I can keep several months of recordings on the internal hard drive. I began doing this about 10 years ago after being frustrated with unreliable CD-R recorders.

A lot is riding on the quality and reliability of those recordings- we have over a million downloads per month, plus our radio broadcast is derived from those recordings. In that situation I would feel confident using either two Denon units or 2 PCs. I would never feel confident using only one recorder.

To answer your 3 questions:

1. No, nothing can happen in five minutes.
2. Post processing is required to get the best sounding recording. However with some nice outboard gear, you can get something that is pretty good straight to the recorder.
3. In my opinion Wavelab is head and shoulders above the rest. Wavelab is now multi platform so you can use it with a PC or Mac.

I've had a lot of bad experiences from anything with the Tascam name on it. Except for their 122 MKIII tape deck I avoid anything form Tascam.

~Jay

[scarleton]

Originally Posted by Jay M

I really like the Denon DN-F650R. It's not cheap, but couldn't be easier to use.

<...snip...>

I've had a lot of bad experiences from anything with the Tascam name on it.

Wow, when this was originally discussed yesterday, the price tag of $100 was thrown out, I was able to push it up to $400, but I think $800 is going to be a bit too rich for us right now. What type of luck have you had with Tascam? Do you know of any other units out there that are not quite as expensive as the Denon?

Originally Posted by Jay M

I keep it separate form the house system by using a mic splitter and separate mixer. That gives me a clean recording without house EQ.

So this is just for the mic(s) the pastor uses? I was thinking that I could split the pastors mic and go straight into one channel and record the board on the other channel as to get everything. I take it from what you are saying I really want his mic to go through another small board if I do that, correct?

Originally Posted by Jay M

To answer your 3 questions:

1. No, nothing can happen in five minutes.
2. Post processing is required to get the best sounding recording. However with some nice outboard gear, you can get something that is pretty good straight to the recorder.
3. In my opinion Wavelab is head and shoulders above the rest. Wavelab is now multi platform so you can use it with a PC or Mac.

Ok, so I cannot produce what I want quickly, such as life, folks will have to wait and download it. The way I see it is: If they get a crappy recording quickly they won't listen to it, if they wait a bit and download a high quality one, they will share it with their friends and neighbors!

So, the question is: how do I learn, I mean really learn, how to do post production well? I have played with crummy software (Soundbooth CS4) and I never could figure out: Ok I hear A, so I should do B. Is the only way to learn how to do that is to find someone that knows and have them teach me?

Sam

[waynehoskins]

I'll tell you what I did for my church. It doesn't address quite the same goals as yours, but I bet you could adapt something from it.

For distribution, we only post to the web, which has become a podcast on iTunes in recent years. My church is new enough that we didn't have an established tape/CD distribution precedent, so people were simply accustomed to listening online, waiting a few days for it to show up. This was when I showed up in 2005; we were portable at the time and recorded the sermon on a portable CD recorder. We moved to a permanent facility a few months after I came around, and within a few months of that, the CD recorder failed.

I've always been a fan of computer-based recording, so that's what we started doing. For a couple of years it was a completely manual process, using Cubase and later Audacity, on my laptop and later on a dedicated box.

I'm a Linux guy, a DBA/SA in my real job, so I eventually realized I could automate the processes. It would eliminate problems like forgetting to start or stop the recording, and would mean that a volunteer (or myself if he wasn't there that week) wouldn't have to pick up the flash drive with the recording and trim it and upload it. It's been running since about 2008 now, and consistently the sermon podcast is up on the web within minutes of the recording stopping, most of that time being the trip up the wire.

The recording machine has a cron job to record the last Sunday service, for the expected duration of the service, which in our case is 80 minutes. 11:00 to 12:20 every Sunday. I use the ALSA recorder, arecord, for this. This step has been around the longest; for a good while we still had to manually edit the automated recordings.

Then I devised a process to write timestamps ("timehacks") to a file, so that I could reference sermon start and stop times to position within the recording. A sermon export script then reads this timehack file after the recording has finished, and attempts to dump out the sermon and push it up the wire. Fully automatic, just have to click a button at the beginning and end of the sermon.

The timehack file also supports events other than "SERMON-START" and "SERMON-END", and I have a button for song and one for generic marker. This isn't meaningful for the sermon podcast, but I can use it to produce a full-service CD with track breaks at appropriate times, using a CD-writing script I wrote. I make on average 1-2 CDs per year. The first one of 2011 I wrote this past Sunday. Somebody wanted a physical CD of the previous Sunday's sermon, and this was the easiest way to do it.

It should be relatively simple to automate a recording with a given start time and duration, extract the sermon, and write that to a CD, ready for duplication mere minutes after the recording finishes. You could probably even do bumper music pretty easily. If you wanted to, you could do normalization and other post-processing by scripting.

For three years I ran an analog tape machine as a backup, in case the computer recording failed. Since automating it, I have only had to go back to the aircheck tape on one occasion. I forget what the occasion was, but it was a rare event that wasn't a machine failure. It could have been a clock issue, or drive full, or no audio on the line, or something like that. I stopped making aircheck tapes earlier this year because the automated process was so reliable. I do have some degree of fault-tolerance because we make a video recording on another computer using a similar process.


A process like mine can get you a pretty-good recording pretty fast. (BTW, really consider doing a podcast, it's a much easier distribution channel, and more relevant than CDs most of the time now) You can get better by really editing it, as you would if it were going on radio, but that would take quite a few hours in edit every week, which adds up.

[petereit]

Whoa! I think my inner geek just fell out.

[Frank DeWitt]

Originally Posted by scarleton

Frank,

Recording to a PC is not an option, it goes back to that saying: if something can go wrong, it will. As far as recording devices goes, the only option I am willing to consider is something mounted in a rack. Someone suggested a portable MP3 recorder, but that just leaves wires to get bumped and other unknowns.

The most important thing is to talk way with the best possible master, if I cannot make the CD's quickly, then it simply isn't meant to be For the record, we don't have a closing song, so I don't have that time buffer to do a fast production of the CD.

Sam

You have to go to what you are comfortable with but just for the record, we went to a PC because we wanted it reliable. EZTracker puts down two tracks simultaneously (one WAV and one MP3) They go to the hard drive and are there ready to play as soon as a new track is started. (in our case during the sermon, every 6 min. if we lost power or the PC died we would lose 6 min maz If we lost a hard drive we would lose the WAV. The mp3 is saved to a USB stick every 6 min. It just works.
Frank

[[Admin] osborn4]

Originally Posted by petereit

Whoa! I think my inner geek just fell out.

that's one thing about Wayne. He makes not pretensions on hiding his geekiness.