So, for the third year in a row, I’m recording a local conference for a non-profit charity in Salt Lake City. It’s the standard fare: a few videos, a bunch of presentations, a round-table discussion, an open-ended business meeting about the organization’s goals for the coming year, and that kind of thing.
Due to privacy and bandwidth concerns, although we’ve done video in the past, it’s totally an audio event. Here is my usual recording rig for this event:
- 12-channel mixer.
- Additional 4-channel mixer “just in case”… sometimes we have breakout sessions or outside-the-floor events I want to capture audio from.
- Six microphones. One wireless body mic, one wireless hand-held mic, four cabled mics with boom stands.
- A Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop at the heart of the rig, running Cakewalk Sonar, with external several-hundred-GB USB drive.
- M-Audio Firewire Audiophile sound card (I hate this and must replace it, it sucks badly. But it cost a pretty penny and sounds better than the internal sound card.)
This is my third year doing this gig, and although the pay is bad, it’s a chance to stretch my legs with my audio engineering skills. I also fill in as the A/V guy for the conference, though I’m really not (I’m just supposed to do the recordings). There just isn’t much competent technical help for the conference.
This year, I want to do some streaming audio, rather than my usual “stop recording, dump to .wav, compress to .mp3, upload to web server between presentations” routine. I have a second laptop available. What would you recommend to do streaming audio to the widest-possible audience running on an eccentric mix of platforms, at extremely low bitrates?