Hey TWiT Fam,
I help a pastor at my church turn his weekly Bible class into a podcast and I’m looking for a better way to automate the process we go through to capture his audio.
Current situation: He uses a wireless body pack that’s part of a small PA system to better broadcast his voice so everyone in the room can hear him properly. The receiver feeds the PA system through the XLR output. We use a digital recorder (TASCAM DR-40) that’s tied directly into the audio receiver via a quarter inch audio jack to give a clean recorded audio signal for the podcast. Each Sunday we set up the recorder, press record to capture the audio for the lesson, then I take out the SD card and transfer the audio files to my iPad or computer for later processing.
Problem: I’m trying to better automate the recording and file transfer process so I (or someone else) doesn’t need to be present in order to transfer the audio files after recording is complete. My ultimate end goal is to have a system in place where the pastor needs to only press “record”, do his Bible study, press “stop” to end the recording, and the audio is automatically uploaded to a cloud service where I can then pull the files to process and turn into a podcast episode. Because I’m usually the only tech-savvy person in the room, having simplicity is to operate the system is a must in the event I’m not able to attend these studies in person.
One possible solution I was looking into was getting an iPod Touch loaded with a recording app like Just Press Record that will automatically upload audio recordings to an iCloud account after a recording is finished. The facility has WiFi, so Internet connectivity isn’t a concern. My concern with this is that additional hardware will be needed such as USB audio interface that ties into the PA system, then connecting to the iPod Touch via a USB connection kit. From testing this type of setup with my iPhone I’m not able to tie directly into the PA system where the iPhone recognizes the audio as an input source. Since I could use the Lightning-to-headphone adapter to record audio with a wired lavalier microphone I was hoping the iOS device would recognize the PA system the same way. However, after connecting to the PA system through a Lightning-to-headphone adapter my iPhone recognizes the source as a speaker (output) and not a microphone (input). This leads me to believe additional hardware is required if I want to continue down this route.
Does anyone have additional suggestions on hardware configurations or potentially integrated solutions that I haven’t been able to find yet?
Another solution I’ve been thinking about would be to have the pastor wear a wired lavalier microphone connected to an iOS device in addition to the wireless body pack he uses so he can still broadcast to the room but we have a recording that automatically uploads, but that may still be too cumbersome for the end user and not as quality of an audio signal as it would be coming directly from the wireless receiver.
Thanks for reading, y’all!