PC for recording

Does your church want to record audio or video?

Any cheap pc will be able to record live audio. An old Pentium III would even be able to do that.
If you want to record video though, it becomes slightly more complicated and more demanding on hardware.
 
Does your church want to record audio or video?

Any cheap pc will be able to record live audio. An old Pentium III would even be able to do that.
If you want to record video though, it becomes slightly more complicated and more demanding on hardware.

Most of the processing can be done on-chip. But you just need to make sure that the PC meets the requirements (preferably the recommended requirements) for the card.

We'll need more information in order to help you. Digital vs analog? What will you be using to record ? Microphone? Camera ?
 
if you want to record video, I suggest you get a video capture card with an onboard encoder. it takes care of encoding the analogue signal to a digital format that your PC can just store.

if you are using a card with an encoder, you roughly need 300MHz per feed that you're recording, otherwise you will need 1GHz per feed.

i've only used the Hauppauge PVR500 capture card, which has two tuners and two encoders. it can record two streams from S-Video, RCA and/or Coax. when recording two shows, my processor (AMD Athlon64 Processor 2.2GHz) is below 10%.
 
Its only audio, will just plug a 3.5mm audio jack into the audio input from the mixer. What software shuold I get, prefrably free.
 
Audacity is a good free audio editor you can use to record audio. It is also a good audio editor as well.
 
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+1 for audacity. Any computer will do.... Pentium 3 and above. From Audacity you can save it as a WAV or an MP3.

That is how we started, later we invested in a DVD recorder... and now we extract the audio from the DVD. So now we have it in Video and Audio.

Give me a PM if you have more questions. I can put you in touch with our Sound guy.
 
Also try http://www.goldwave.com/ - I've had better luck with that than with Audacity sometimes :). But yeah really any PC will do the job well enough if it's just audio. The main thing you need to take care of is the recording equipment. A good microphone is essential. We've had some really bad experiences with cheap mics. Test everything thoroughly beforehand, do a run all the way through to MP3 stage to make sure that it's going to come out ok.
 
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