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Ask Slashdot: Recording Business Meeting Audio On an Intranet?
dousette writes "I have been tasked with modernizing our company's board room. Replacing the overhead projector with a more modern LCD projector is a no-brainer, speakers are easy enough to wire off of the HDMI projector, but one of the requirements that has me stumped is the recording of minutes. The existing system uses wired microphones connected to a cassette player, and what I would love to replace this with are some sort of Ethernet microphone that could stream directly to a Windows file share. Does such an animal exist? Do you have any other suggestions for the room that I might be missing?" So if you wanted to bypass a stand-alone system, how would you go about dumping audio straight to your network?
As far as I know, you could put a linux-box there with pulseaudio and make the input device network-available. You could record then with any pulseaudio-system anywhere.
Use bluetooth, Connect to any networked machine within range. Or if a laptop is there, use its built in mic. You can grab the Audio with Audacity.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=network+audio+recorder
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Do you just dump the audio archives somewhere for hypothetical later retrieval (which isn't really "minutes"), or is somebody tasked with creating the actual minutes from the recordings after the meeting? Having a person writing up the minutes as the meeting progresses is generally a better idea in my experience. Then it's just normal document editing.
http://www.amazon.com/Marantz-PMD580-Rack-Mount-CompactFlash-Recorder/dp/B0017OM6JQ
we install them all the time.
And yes it's the only real solution, if they balk at the price, they really dont want to do what you are asking, hook up a Laptop and press record if they are too cheap to buy the real tool for the job.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You could try the Revolabs xTag USB and your favorite capture software. We use them connected directly to an amp since we don't record but the base has a mini-USB plug for just what your are needing to do.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Voip Phone. Networked intercoms. There are plenty of these.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If the current mics are giving you decent audio, it would be way simpler just to either connect them to the sound in on an existing computer, or if there isn't already going to be something always on, you could set up a plug computer which could easily upload the recordings, or perhaps even host them its self. Something like the SheevaPlug should be more than enough.
We use GoToMeeting to record this stuff. Mind you, every time we need to record something, we also happen to have stakeholders from other offices calling in for the meeting. If everyone is present in the same room, then G2M would add an extra, unnecessary, layer.
audio is hard video is easy
There's numerous "security" solutions for recording video including movement detector systems.
disk space is cheap enough you should just record 1 hour chunks constantly and recycle as the disk fills.
Its technically possible but I strongly recommend against the whole idea... You're going to completely freak people out about creepers having nothing to downloading meetings solely to watch the hotties and borderline paranoids who watch too much CSI and 24 are going to think terrorists are going to hack in and destroy everyone or sell all your top secret ideas to the Chinese "Can you believe he went on record in a video file that we use GIT to store our source code? What if the Chinese or terrorists found out?". Wait till the first time a supervisor takes an employee in there for a "private disciplinary discussion" and it gets uploaded to youtube and the company and/or supvr gets sued (perhaps a setup?). Its just a terrible, awful idea full of negative outcome in exchange for basically nothing positive.
The worst part is only two groups are going to really know how it works... the IT guys who don't really want to become the AV guys for wanna be actors, and the bad guys doing something nefarious.
Probably the most intelligent and cheapest idea is anyone who's stuck writing meeting minutes gets to use the record app on their iphone/android phone. For the cost of an exotic security or AV system you could probably buy every admin assistant a smart phone and service for a couple years.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
To get the obligatory Raspberry Pi out of the way: Hook up a microphone to a Raspberry Pi, and have that record/dump onto your local network fileshare.
On a more serious note though, it should be the job of someone in the meeting to take the minutes. It'll all well and good to have an automated system recording audio of the thing for future reference, but it is much better to have someone taking down the key points manually. Not only do you have a backup incase of failure of your system, but you also have a summary with the most important points which is much easier to skim over and extract information from.
If you combine handwritten notes with a document scanner in the room you can have a system to scan, archive and distribute a copy of the minutes almost instantly. Alternatively the minutes could be typed onto a netbook/small laptop and that document emailed round.
An excellent business-type question is what do you expect to accomplish?
Will anyone use the minutes, for anything, ever?
In 20 years I've never used meeting minutes or seen them used by anyone else. For anything. Agendas, yes. Personal "post it note to myself" type stuff, yes. Personal post it notes to follow up with X regarding his assignment, yes. But generic meeting minutes? Never. Not once.
If you're trying to "prove" and document a meeting happened for a bean counting metric of meetings per quarter or something, you can use a calendaring app and/or agendas to "prove" it. Or signed statements. Or just fire people who can't be trusted.
If you've trying to document merely to "look more professional" its cheaper to enforce a minimal dress code (ties for all, no jeans, something like that)
If you're trying to make people self-censor, perhaps sex harassment or reduce honesty or something, just have HR provide some training classes and/or wait for them to slip up in email then fire them. There's cheaper ways to intimidate than an elaborate AV recording system.
From an expense standpoint, assuming they're used, is the probably very high cost of this "system" lower than the expense of not having it?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Have a laptop running with a decent microphone, which you can pick up from Radio Shack for 20$. Have something running like GoTomeeting or Netviewer
http://www.netviewer.com/en/
Where you can record the audio and video of the meeting directly to a file, which can be saved on your laptop or to a folder on your network. I've done this many times for conference calls. Works great.
Handwriting? Surely you meant typing.
If an meeting is configured as a Lync Online meeting I know that any sort of audio/video can easily be recorded by using the start and stop recording features in Lync. Those generally do get stored on a users local laptop instead of in a central location though.
because if it's on a machine accessable to The Connected Internet, and anybody who wants to punk or bleed you wants it, they'll find a way to it.
there's still such a thing as a microcassette recorder, and such a thing as a digital recorder, that you can start, set next to the conferencing phone, and have a clerk type up. not all technology needs to migrate to the cloud by 5 pm today.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Does your company use an audio conferencing (phone) system? Either internally or from an external provider (like webex)? If so just have someone use that facility, plus those can usually record any slides/applications/desktops that are shared in the meeting as well.
Otherwise you'll have a solution that is unique to one room, which seems like nothing more than a glorified tape recorder, and if someone is dialed into the meeting, while everyone else is sitting in the room, that one person's voice won't be recorded.
I did similar research for nearly-automated audio recording of our church sermons. I wanted to make it super-simple to minimize the added workload on our not-so-computer-savvy Sunday helpers.
I finally settled on using RecordPad from NCH Software, installed on a dedicated and inexpensive laptop, and set to load automatically when Windows launches.
http://www.nch.com.au/recordpad/index.html
After using it for about a year, I'm VERY happy.
RecordPad is not too expensive (about $40) and it is VERY easy to use. It can record to most common audio file formats. Once you've got it configured, it's just one button to start/stop the recording, using the default settings. It auto-names the recordings with configurable tags. As soon as recording is completed, it can also be set to upload the resulting audio file to via FTP to any site you designate.
In our case, for privacy purposes, we upload to a protected folder, and we then manually move the recordings to the main audio folder. But if the recording is not suitable for public distribution (like telling a sensitive story about a church member - or in the case at hand, discussing sensitive boardroom business) we simply leave it in the protected folder, where it's still accessible to staff.
One thing about NCH software can be either highly annoying or highly desirable - they have a very slick install-on-demand setup. Everything installs as a limited-function demo, so if you ask to try something it is very quickly available without any installers or messy configuration. NCH offers several useful companions to RecordPad such as a fairly easy and intuitive audio editing program, a recording library program, etc. This may be valuable if you want easy tools to go along with the basic recording functions.
I have no connection to NCH - I'm just a very satisfied customer and think this is a particularly handy solution to nearly-automatic record-and-upload requirements.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
You already have a projector, and presumably a laptop or PC to run it when someone does not bring their own device. One or two omnidirectional mics with mute buttons, and a script or app to run it all. Perhaps Audacity. All on the existing PC in the room, and mutable by anyone at the table. YOu could also perhaps rig a light or an icon on the projected image to indicate recording is on with the right scripts.
Silence is a state of mime.
After all, digital audio makes it much easier to erase a few minutes' worth of incriminating evidence, all without having to do the Rose Mary Stretch.
I am officially gone from
We moved our (50-person) family business over to Office365 and use MS Lync. The meeting organizer creates an "online meeting" in addition to the physical meeting, and runs Lync on his/her laptop. Click the Record button, and it saves all the powerpoints+IMs+audio that comes from the meeting. (this requires the microphones to be plugged in of course). There are options to have to save them on a central facility but I never figured that out -- we just save them locally, and upload to a sharepoint site when needed.
Not knowing the details of your video conferencing set-up, the very first thing that comes to mind is buying a USB-powered microphone (like one of these) and running Audacity or other recording software on a PC, which could save to a file on the network. However, I'd probably also take a good look at recording through the video conferencing equipment itself -- I'd imagine that it could do this natively.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Handwriting? Surely you meant typing.
Well, yeah, but I am also taking into account meetings where that may not be practical, such as those involving lots of diagrams/mathematical equations or those which refer to a hard copy document (which could then also be scanned).
Cat5 and newer has an 'extra' twisted pair in each cable.
Just disconnect the extra pair from behind the wall panal and solder a condenser mic across the leads. Do it to all the conference rooms and offices in the executive suite. When you need to hear what they are plotting and planning you go into the wiring closet and listen.
None of the suits will notice their network is only 10Mbps.
Credit where it's due. The BOFH did this many years ago, back when his column was funny.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
VoIP - leverage your PBX recording facilities.
Asterisk, FreeSwitch, and even the commercial VOIP guys all support recording conversations. Avaya does, as an example.
Heck, your PBX may already be recording every call and storing them for a week.
After all, when was the last time any meeting was held that didn't include a conference bridge for call-in attendees?
For video, I am using an Optoma ML500. I would not use any other laser or lcd projector at this point.
For audio, I use an Olympus digital recorder on a rubber pad. It can record many hours of audio before it fills up. It shows up as a USB stick when you plug it in, and is compatible with Linux. Then, I use Audacity to remove noise, and the quality is really great. Sony has a nice recorder too, but I won't do business with them after the GeoHot fiasco.
Recording to a server is a possiblity, and I use it with WebEx, but I would not install it in a room. I would not have a room based setup for direct recording for two reasons; portability and security. Imagine a situation where someone starts an unauthorized (and possibly illegal) recording. Or, perhaps, they access a previous recording on a network share. Maybe someone forgot to stop recording and the party that uses the room next does not know that it is on. This could sink a company.
IANAL, but like to make sure that I record consent from all parties before continuing, and provide a copy to all parties upon conclusion. You may have to consult your lawyer before implementation.
Multicast!
coding is life
Certain Ethernet webcams could do that. They can also be multi-purpose if you want (video conferencing) - streaming is easy, I use VLC from the command line with a small script that breaks it in chunks of 30 minutes on one of the servers to stream video (w/o audio but it could include audio) to a network share.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
>So if you wanted to bypass a stand-alone system, how would you go about dumping audio straight to your network? You do NOT put boardroom meeting recordings on a network share..
Discussions in a boardroom are supposed to be confidential and available only to those designated. If you put those on a network share they are simply not confidential anymore. Too many sources for error. Too easy to be tempted by others to listen.
Simply replace the cassette recorder with a solid state recorder where the memory chips can be easily removed (several suggestions in the discussion). Then the person responsible for the recordings can physically secure them.
If you want to go low tech, get a Zoom H2n and out it on a small mike stand in the middle of the table. Then the person responsible for the recordings can physically secure it and the recordings. It has 4 mics, so it will give a pretty decent recording (there are other brands, but I have seen this one in use).
K.I.S.S
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Thanks for all the helpful comments (even you, "let me google that for you" guy)!
We have a requirement that all board meetings have to be recorded for two reasons -- one, so the minutes can be derived from the recording, and two, open records requests by the public to hear the meeting audio. Recordings have to be kept for a certain period, and I was hoping to automate the boxes and boxes of old tapes we have sitting around (by keeping X previous recordings and dropping the oldest ones automatically when their expiration date comes).
Before "let me google that for you" guy Googled it for me I read an article on doing this with Pulseaudio, but I am more in the market for a commercial solution for capturing and streaming the audio. It has to work every time without technical assistance, and while there are some areas where I am comfortable rolling my own solution, this is not one of them. Now, for the receiving piece running on a server in the datacenter I am open to a more customized solution.
I found a product from Barix called the Exstreamer 500 for about $600 at Pro Audio Gear. Does anyone have any experience with Barix devices? It appears that it can either stream the audio over a built-in Shoutcast server or record directly to a USB key. If streaming over a private VLAN to a non-internet-connected server is deemed too risky by mgmt, then at the very least the recordings could be uploaded from the USB key (maybe along with the manual transcription and/or minutes) after the meeting.
Thanks again for all your suggestions! I knew someone out there had to have done this before me.