CDs Available at the End of the Service

I've got an application, and I'm wondering if you folks with more experience than I with Sonar have a solution to it.

First, a little background.

Ages ago, my congregation used to record synagogue services on cassette tape: two C-90 tapes per service, recorded with a dual-well auto-reverse deck (one with two recorders, rather than just one). The deck was smart enough to auto-reverse at the end of the side, and switch to the other well at the end of the tape. Technically, we had a separate stereo mix going to tape, but in real life it sucked big-time, especially during the music, because our sound engineers had neither time nor skill to pay attention to the record mix. But we generally got most of the sermon, with ten or fifteen seconds cut out for the auto-reverse leader gap.

Then we changed things a bit. I had a MOTU 828mkII that I wasn't using, plus an old Windows XP machine (Pentium II, 200MHz, 256MB, something like that). So I put Sonar on the machine and hooked it up to the house console's eight subgroups via the 828mkII, and bought a couple of 40GB external FireWire hard drives. Then I wrote some scripts so that the sound guy, when he got in, would hook up one of the external drives to the FireWire cable and turn on the computer. It'd automatically start a new Sonar project and pop into Sonar. At some point before the service, the sound guy would press the R key and start Sonar recording, then forget about the whole thing for the rest of the day. (I had the levels from the subgroups deliberately set eight to ten dB down so that nobody ever had to worry about anything clipping during recording.) At the end of the service, I'd save the project, shut the computer down, and take the disk drive home with me, where I'd produce the recording down to two master CDs.

On the first pass, I'd find all the program splits and do an Alt-E/S (probably Edit | Split, but I've been doing it so long I remember the keyboard accelerator rather than the menu item) across all eight tracks. It was surprising how long this took me--45min to an hour for a 2.5-hour service. On the second pass, I'd select all the clips in a single program and Alt-P/A/N; I'm thinking that's probably Process | Audio | Normalize. That wouldn't take too long, except of course you can't do anything else while Sonar is normalizing. On the third pass, I'd do whatever cleanup needed to be done; generally, not that much. On the fourth pass, I'd select all the clips in a program and Alt-F/E/A, which is probably File | Export | Audio, and mix down to a two-track WAV file. Once I had thirteen or fourteen WAV files, I'd use Nero to burn them to a couple of CDs (and LAME to make MP3s for the website, etc.). Then the next Saturday I'd take the master CDs in to the synagogue so that the rabbi's secretary could duplicate them for folks who wanted copies.

That all worked very nicely, and people were very happy with the increase in quality over the audio cassettes. But now it's been about two years, and the old what-have-you-done-for-me-lately syndrome is taking over; now they're dissatisfied with the one-week latency (two weeks if I'm out for a weekend or if there's a burst of services (the high holidays between Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot, for example) that I can't keep up with), and they want to get up after the service, mill around a bit, maybe have a shmooze and a nosh, then round up the kids, get their coats, and stop by the secretary's office to pick up a copy of that morning's service.

The regimen I'm used to is absolutely not going to work under such restrictions. Our sound guys have not gotten more knowledgeable about recording. (All they do now is push one button and forget.) It is possible that we could get a separate sound guy to ride the recording levels while the PA guy is doing his thing, so that we don't have to record at -10dB or so. And if we can come up with a production/mixdown procedure that can be boiled down to a list of mechanical steps, he could probably use it to make master CDs. But we're talking about twenty to thirty minutes max between the time the rabbi says, "Shabbat shalom!" and the time the secretary needs to be dropping a master CD into the duplicator.

So I'm thinking eliminate Pass Two (normalization) by having a guy ride faders, maybe on a hardware MIDI control surface. Simplify Pass Three (cleanup) into just deleting unneeded clips (for example, from the Bass and Guitar tracks during the sermon, and from the Speaker track during the songs--that sort of thing). Perhaps Pass Four (export to WAV) could be automated somehow, although I didn't find a way.

And there's still that pestiferous Pass One (splitting into programs). I'm thinking that it would be a lot easier for the recording sound guy to hit a key or something during recording when the program splits happen, than it is for me to find the splits by listening to the recording after the fact. Do you guys know of a way to do that?

One large benefit we found from eight-track recording was the ability to make recordings for the music team and mix them in various pedagogically-useful but generally non-pleasing ways so that they could use them for educational purposes. We don't need that every week, but it'd be nice to keep that capability around--in other words, mixing down to two tracks in analog and using a hardware real-time CD burner is sub-optimal.

What do you think?

Thanks...

Thanks for the suggestion; I'll investigate.

At our church we do a live mix straight to a CD. If need be, we could duplicate as soon as we finalize the master and drop it into the duplicator, but our typical turn-around time is one week for duplication and printing. Of course, we are hoping to go to a multi-track recorder setup, especially for special events like Christmas and Easter musicals, etc. This would allow us to mix after the fact, much like the setup you describe.

The other problem with the live recording straight to CD is there is no going back and correcting something, no matter how bad. Our situation is currently complicated by using a single board for House and Recording (we use Aux 3/4 for Left and Right). This means the two techs are sometimes (often!) working over and under each other. And recording with the Aux knobs is totally different from riding faders and using a pan knob.

Training for the recording techs would be a help. It would be more work than simply hitting 'R' as they do now. Recording is different from house sound, and we are finishing a course that I am teaching at our church on recording to help with that. So far the changes we have heard on the service CDs are promising.

Also, how many CDs are you generating a week? The more Cds the longer the turn around time (I am also just a bit curious )

Best of luck

ORIGINAL: macflooze

Get a CD recorder - straight stereo mix for instant duplication, like the old days.

Thanks for the suggestion. We're looking into that. Unfortunately, that's a fair chunk of change, because we'd need two CD recorders: our service won't fit on one, and there's no good place in the middle to swap CDs and eat that minute or so of load time.

The other problem with the live recording straight to CD is there is no going back and correcting something, no matter how bad.

Perzackly.

Our sound guys are frequently faced with the problem of doing a whole bunch of mutes and unmutes practically instantaneously. For example, the music team is finishing a song, and the cantor is about to swing into a piece of liturgy. They need to get all the instrumental and vocalist channels muted and the cantor's channel unmuted, bang, just like that. Unfortunately, our house console doesn't have "scenes," so what the sound guy ends up doing is unmuting the cantor first (the cantor is probably absently singing along with the music, not paying much attention, but having that in the PA isn't a terrible thing, because everybody else is singing too, and it's kind of covered up) and then, a moment later, muting the music team as the cantor begins chanting.

On the recording, though, we get the music team winding down nicely, then suddenly the cantor's voice cuts in mid-word, usually doing some kind of oh-I-didn't-know-I-was-on stuff--maybe even whispering with the rabbi. That's why it would help to do at least a little editing: slice the performance into programs, and delete all the speaker-channel clips from the song programs. Can't do that going straight to live CD.

Our situation is currently complicated by using a single board for House and Recording (we use Aux 3/4 for Left and Right). This means the two techs are sometimes (often!) working over and under each other. And recording with the Aux knobs is totally different from riding faders and using a pan knob.

Does your console offer subgroups? My 828mkII can easily record 16 simultaneous channels, but in order to simplify the production process we're just recording our console's eight subgroups. Let's see: we have a Bass subgroup, with just the bass in it; a Harmonic subgroup, with guitar and keys; a Solo subgroup, with trumpet, trombone, clarinet, mandolin, and percussion; a Men subgroup with male vocals; a Women subgroup with female vocals; a Lead subgroup with just the lead singer; a Speaker subgroup with the rabbi, the cantor, the Torah reader, and whoever else has a speaking part; and an Audience subgroup that consists solely of a microphone on the stage pointed at the audience. I think that makes eight. Get yourself a MIDI control surface, and your recording guy can have his own console to mix on. (Provided you throw together a digital multitrack recording rig, of course.)

Piece of advice for anyone seriously considering any of the above: don't even think about arguing, get yourself a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) for the recording equipment. If you have a power outage, or somebody backs into the breaker switch, or whatever, you'll experience a momentary failure as the analog stuff goes down; but you'll likely have it right back up again. If the digital stuff goes down, though, you'll miss a lot of stuff as you wait for it to reboot, and you might lose a bunch of stuff in memory that hasn't been written to disk yet too.

Training for the recording techs would be a help. It would be more work than simply hitting 'R' as they do now.

Amen, brother; preach it!

Also, how many CDs are you generating a week? The more Cds the longer the turn around time (I am also just a bit curious )

Takes me between two and three hours of pretty solid work to turn out two CDs for one standard Shabbat-morning worship service. Sometimes I can put the sermon on one CD and everything else on the other (with a little seven-second recorded message in place of the sermon saying to look for it on the other CD in the set); other times everything else is too long to fit on one CD and I just have to split the service roughly down the middle.

Sometimes it's a little harder. For example, during the high holidays we have an Erev Rosh Hashanah service, a Rosh Hashanah service, an Erev Yom Kippur service, a Yom Kippur service, a Ne'ilah service, a Shabbat service in there somewhere, and a Sukkot service at the end, all in about two weeks or so. During that season I'm a producin' fool. I get all seven services produced just about in time for the Simchat Torah service that happens when we get to the end of the year's Torah readings. (With a Bible, when you get to the end you can just flip back to the beginning and start over; but with a Torah scroll, you have to wind for awhile. We make a celebration out of it, with lots and lots of music.)

ORIGINAL: Clydewinder

hit F11 while recording to insert a marker on the fly, you can go back and name it later

Thanks for that; I really appreciate it. Those are the sorts of things that can be tough to find. I noticed you can even name it while the recording is going on. That's handy.

Since you're so good at answering questions, here's another: can you assign F11 to a MIDI discrete controller, so that somebody can get the same effect by pressing a button on a MIDI control surface?

How about considering using the PC with a stereo feed from your main board into the PC's line-in jack to record directly to the PC harddrive using something like Nero Wave Recorder or Sound Forge. Once the application (Nero/Soundforge) is opened and initial parameters set for recording, with about two or three mouse clicks a teck can start recording a segment (equivalent to a track), two more clicks can end a current recording and start a new one. No need to stop and save each segment (the application will automatically name and save the copy for you). At the end of service you will have a number of wave or MP3 files that are ready to roll onto a CD. If you beef up the PC with several burners (I have 4 in my PC's) then you can burn multiple copies of the CD simultaneously. You can also print your labels using the same PC (might be a bit much for a low end PC). If you had a small low end mixer (4 or 6 channels) that you could front end the PC, you could master the recording in realtime. Since each recorded segment becomes a WAV or MP3 file, you could also use your Nero or Sound Forge or other similar application to massage/edit the Wave/MP3 files to you satisfaction. It could be a low end approach to accomplish what you're seeking.

i think options / key bindings lets you assign any midi note number or continuous controller to any computer keyboard key