mp3 production – church sermon recording

This page is actually quite old now. More recently I’ve been using Ubuntu on an older Toshiba laptop for arranging things at the Christian fellowship that I attend. We’re looking at using OpenSong for lyrics and Bible quotations on the projector. I’ve also had a first shot at live recording straight on to the laptop using the “mono mix” from the mixing desk and a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) sound editing application called Audacity; Audacity can encode files to MP3 itself (I think it use the LAME encoder), which is handy.

The original page follows:

A Christian brother contacted me to ask about sermon recording. One of the problems he was having was with slow MP3 encoding from WAV files in windows. So, I did some googling around and whipped up this page. I hadn’t realised that you could record MP3 on-the-fly – that is create MP3’s live. Similar things can be done with WMA and OGG files. So Leeor, this one is for you.

mp3 general comments

http://bladeenc.mp3.no/skeleton/speed.html has a few paragraphs about speed of encoders, seems Xing (see eg http://www.sonicspot.com/xingmp3encoder/xingmp3enc oder.html) and Gogo are the fastest but Xing, at least, produces some flanging errors and so wouldn’t be great for music.

The BladeEnc mp3 encoder also allows command line redirection, so theoretically it can be used for on the fly recording of mp3 from any audio source … not sure how this would be done in practice though.

Sonicspot and mp3-converter are both good sites for general info and software reviews in this area. Also mitiok.cjb.net has lots of Lame info.

Live mp3 encoding

Having done a search at sourceforge.net (my favourite site! – open source software for Win/*nix/*BSD/ etc.) I came up with http://liveincode.sourceforge.net/ (available for Windows, I haven’t tried this yet) and a program called DarkIce which appears to be primarily for ShoutCast (streaming audio) encoding. I’d try liveincode. It’s also available in Russian, but I don’t see a Hebrew version!

Actually, googling around using “on-the-fly mp3 recording” I got quite a few hits, in order of how useful they appear to be:

1. http://www.1oo-percent.de/lamer/ which looks very nice! howtouse_4.html.
2. http://www.fridgesoft.de/harddiskogg.php do> quite a few formats, including ogg.
3. mixmp3, the readme sounds fine but the website doesn’t inspire confidence, appearances can be deceptive though!
4. http://www.netwaysglobal.com/mpegrec which can be used (see linuxfocus article which also discusses using sox | lame [ie sox piped into lame] for on-the-fly mp3 recording), it’s a command line tool. I’m assuming that this won’t be of interest to you. IF it is then you’ll need something like 7-zip to extract the tar.gz compressed files.

At the bottom of this mp3 links page I think it mentions all of these applications.