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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.
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.
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.
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?
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'
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.
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.