8 hour recording

[nrgsav]

Hi I have just bought a good microphone for my PC. I would like to use it to record an 8 hour conference. There will be speakers following each other and people will be coming to view the speaker relevent to their topic.

Can someone reccomend a recording software which will do this? I realise it will take a lot of hard disk space thats why i'm reluctant to use sound recorder as i think it may crash the PC.

Thanks for your help.

Rob

[AndyH]

There are issues with absolute file size, regardless of the recording program. WAV files have either a 2 or 4 G limit, I forget at the moment. Some programs will not function beyond that limit, others break the recording into multiple files.

n-Track Studio is a fairly inexpensive program that simply continues onto the next file when it reaches 2G. There is no loss of data or any defects in what is being recorded at that time. This program is intended to be a lot more than a simple recorder, but it is fairly easy to ignore all the extras and simply record. The recorded file can later be processed in n-Track or any other audio editor if you need to do something with it.

n-Track Studio comes in both 16 bit and 24 bit versions, at different prices. 24 bit is nice (and useful) for many things but not necessary for what you propose. http://www.fasoft.com/

If you make a recording at less than 16 bit it will tend to be significantly noisier than it needs to. This is unavoidable at the lesser bit depths. You can, however, decrease the sample rate to good advantage, vis a vis the file size. Use 22050 instead of the more common 44100 and your file size will be half.

If you only have the one input, record in mono to use only have the space of stereo. This should be done while recording even if you later intend to write to audio CD, which will require dual tracks. It is easy enough to make ‘stereo' when you are ready to do the CDs.

[robertruetz]

Andy makes good suggestions. Otherwise, I would try to break it up manually somehow. Perhaps stop and start files when speakers start and stop. Surely people aren't going to sit there for 8 straight hours? I would definitely record at 22.050K 16-bit Mono since this should just be speech. That's probably the lowest sample/bit rate I would go at for quality sake.

There are several free audio recording programs out there that will do the job, again, none that have the functionality of the program Andy mentioned. You could try googling to search for something similar, or Google "Audacity" (a free two-track recorder/editor--even though you only need the one channel).

I realize our suggestions might all sound a bit confusing, so feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Good Luck
Le_Singe
:cool: