Soundroom+Tech+and+Recording+in+the+Sanctuary

This page is started as part of a planning effort to create much less of a Rube Goldberg set of wires and contraptions for capture of audio in the sanctuary for editing and potential sharing on the Internet "Cloud".

One C3HUU member asked me in the summer:

"Where are the sermons kept?" I pointed to the digital recorders, wires, and other hardware sitting on top and to the left of the Soundboard. "So that little black box and the little white box hold the sermons? Is that safe and secure?"

Well, they have been, but the Dockstar little white box is wearing out after nearly two years of constant service. The RAID hard disk box is working fine, but the wires can be disturbed, especially when a special event occurs and much hectic pulling and pushing of wires goes on in the Soundroom.

So in e-mail I asked of the Soundroom team for volunteers to assist in:


 * 1) Sizing and costing a fully integrated professional rack mount solution with multi-track recorder and digital upload
 * the last one we sized was almost $1000 with custom programming required when semi-automated upload like we have now was included
 * 1) Sizing and costing a single integrated "box" to replace the "white box" Dockstar server + "black box" external disk drives + external power supplies that sit beside Soundboard
 * many alternatives here from a dedicated laptop or "net top" to a dedicated PC in the Soundroom

There is no urgency that I'm aware of, but planning a replacement and considering future directions such as video recording and video serving takes some thought!

Here is a quick diagram of the current setup: (TBD)
 * Two digital recorders, one for sermons or select parts of a performance, one for the whole service or event connected to the sound output of the Soundboard. These recorders become USB memory devices when turned off and back on and setup that way. They also operate as recorders when connected via USB cable to a host device.
 * One Dockstar server ("little white box") connected to the Internet and the digital recorders as a USB host device. Always on, and acts as an Internet gateway to the My.pogoplug.com Cloud service
 * One external RAID disk drive case ("little black box") attached to the Dockstar server which has two disk drives that back each other up and hold the past few years worth of audio data from all the prior digital audio recorders. These are backed up to a separate laptop every two to 3 months.
 * NOTE: the whole system is currently mono(phonic), not stereo. There are many parts of the Soundroom installation that CAN support stereo, but all of the setup today is for single output microphones with a single channel input to the Soundboard. Output is the same signal to each of the Left and Right set of speakers and recorders from the Soundboard.

Here is a proposed next generation setup: (TBD)
 * Two digital recorders, or at least the function of being able to independently start at least two sessions with two tracks each (to support stereo if implemented).
 * Recording capability that COULD be used for video digital upload and management. Video is at least 10x more data per minute, and 10x the computing required to edit than simple compressed audio (MP3) which we acquire and upload today.