Sermon Recorder and CD Burner Box
Recently I acquired a decent workstation PC that my workplace excessed off in a lottery. My desire is to turn this workstation into a simple audio recording and cd burning box, for the purpose of recording live sermons at church, and burning audio CDs of the sermons for folks to take home and give out to friends. Simple enough.
I purchased a few Linux distros from http://www.frozentech.com and received them quickly. I'll be using them for now if I need to buy any more distros. I found the process to be much easer than doing a torrent to pull down the distros, as the DVDs I ordered came nicely labeled, and when one of the didn't work right, they shipped out a replacement right away.
So, here is what I want out of the box: It needs to be easy enough to use so that a volunteer trained in a few minutes can record decent audio and burn the results to CD.
I chose Audacity for the audio recording tool. Audacity is the best straightforward audio recording app I've seen for linux. While not nearly as comprehensive as Ardour, Audacity offers just the right features.\
The one feature Audacity does not have built-in is a "Burn to CD" feature. For that, I turn to K3b.
K3b is a tool that resembles Nero or maybe Adaptec CD Creator; users can start an Audio CD project, and drag files in there to make the CD. Easy enough.
So here goes!
Debian 3.1 r1, aka "Sarge"
The installation was a breeze.
Audacity installed flawlessly.
I had to manually install the LAME encoder for mp3 playback, but that was easy enough to do.
K3b installed simple enough.
Now for the bad part - K3b refuses to recognize my CD-RW drive.
I follow the docs, and tell the bootloader to treat it as ide-scsi (hdd=ide-scsi).
And now, K3b doesn't recognize the drive at all!
I google it up, and loads of people are complaining about K3b not seeing their CD-RW, and Debian "sarge" not doing cd burning.
So, in goes the Fedora Core 4 DVD!
Fedora Core 4
Installation was a snap.
Audacity is not offered, so I go to sourceforge to download it.
Audacity is not available as an .rpm, so I look at the requirements to build it from source.
I remember doing this before! It was a horrid nightmare, requirements that had requirements that had requirments.
Forget that, in goes the Kubuntu 5.10 DVD!
Kubuntu 5.10
I'm installing it now
1 hour later
and I'm giving up on Kubuntu.
Can't get Audicity to install, even though I downloaded the 'Ubuntu Linux' version from sourceforge.
Can't get LAME to install.
Forget it.
Back to Debian, it was the closest one yet. If I can either get Kb3 to work, or find an alternative, I'll be happy with that.
