Hi,
I am doing seminars on motivational speaking for groups 10 to 15 people. I speak to each specific person within the group for about 15 minutes and would like to record a separate CD for each person in the group. Is there a way to burn a CD for the first person and continue recording for the 2nd person while the 1st CD is burning?
Audacity doesn’t burn anything, so the top level answer is no, particularly if you want to hand them a CD as they’re getting into the car.
If you can do all this in post production (later), then I would record the works with a personal audio recorder (or even the recorder in a smartphone). You can break the performance up into individual chunks in Audacity and cause Audacity to export a segment for each guest. Drag each segment into the burner of your choice and burn.
If you have a larger system that’s running Audacity to capture all the performances, use the Label HotKey at the end of each individual segment. Audacity will then export a fresh sound file at each label.
But it still won’t burn anything.
Koz
I wonder why you don’t just email an MP3 to each participant so they can play it on their smartphone? Can you still buy blank CDs? I know the latest sweep of Mac products won’t burn them any more.
Koz
iTunes, the Finder and any other disc related program will still burn CD’s on OSX, providing you buy an external burner, of course.
The simplest thing to do is to load tracks into iTunes, make a playlist and burn it. iTunes will convert automagically from whatever sound format to 16 bit, 44.1 KHz on the fly.
If you need more options, like CD-text fi, you need to buy Toast. I haven’t used that in at least ten years. Audio is handled by iTunes, everything else by Disk utility.
And yes, you can still buy blank media. It’s all crap though, as the one factory that made quality blank media was in the vicinity of the Fukushima reactor. They’re growing lettuce indoors there now. It won’t come back.
Thanks so much for your quick replies. My next event is Sunday the 20th. I love the idea of simply emailing an MP3 file! That will make things so much easier for me. That way each person can leave with their MP3 file right then and there. Can anyone recommend a professional yet affordable recording device to use along with Audacity. I have researched the Audio-Technica ATR2100 USB and am thinking about moving forward with this. It comes with a USB cord that I can hook up to the laptop. This way I’m assuming I can start and stop the recording and load each to a separate file.
Also does Audacity Compress the audio file so that it can be emailed? If not is there a free audio sharing sharing site that will compress to send to people so that they can leave with it?
MP3 and OGG are compressed formats. File size of an MP3 or OGG file are typically around 1/4 to 1/8th of the size of a WAV file (depending on the setting used) and may be as small as 1/10th of the size of a WAV file. Note that there is a trade-off between file size and sound quality. The “more compressed” (less “bits per second”), the smaller the file size will be, but the worse the sound quality will be. Mono files can achieve better sound quality for a given file size than stereo (because mono has only one audio channel whereas stereo has two).
MP3 is more widely supported than OGG, but requires that you install LAME. See: Audacity Manual
Thanks You! Would you recommend using the Audio-Technica ATR2100 to use along with Audacity. If not is there a preferred recording device for lectures/seminars that will provide good sound quality?