English Documentation

Welcome to the SermonRecorder documentation!

Although this does not at all deserve the name documetation yet, I hope this will help users to understand what SermonRecorder is doing for them...

General description, intention

The intention for developing SermonRecorder was to give churches a small, yet powerful tool to record the sermons on a PC. This process includes some special requirements:

• Many different people do the sound operator's job, not all of them are at adminstrator level and know exacly what they're doing.

• Recordings are required for different destinations and thus different file types:

  • MP3 in high quality

  • MP3 for download (smaller in size)

  • WAV for further processing, etc.

  • files for directly recording Audio-CDs

• mp3-Encoding of a 30 minutes recording can take some minutes. This can be pretty annoying after the service.

• In some churches, the Speaker and his Subject is not known in advance. So, the Operator has to find out his naming data and name the recorded files at the time he is saving his recording.
• The file naming convention should stay the same over many recordings, so that the sermon recordings can be sorted easily.

The idea was that many of these processes and requirements could easily be parallelized and automized. This was the beginning of SermonRecorder. :-)

Functions

• Recording from all standard Windows Sound inputs, plus ASIO devices.
• Extremely simple standard user interface with one button start/stop oparation. The only thing the user may need to enter is the Speaker's name and the Subject (e.g. the bible verse index).
• Automatic naming of output files using parameters.
• File names and parameters can be set in the settings dialog, so that the "normal user" does not necessarily get into contact with that.
• Splitting records: Searches for silence after a while and splits the record there. Available for all destinations. For CD-Recordings, the splitting is done in the cuesheet file, not in the wav file.
• Hibernation mode is suppressed by SR automatically, if the checkbox in the settings dialog is checked.
• All settings are stored for the next program start, so that a standard sunday morning service on SermonRecorder should be like:
  • Start SR
  • Press Start
  • Enter the speaker's name as soon as you know it
  • Enter the subject as soon as it's known
  • Press Stop at the end
    Everything else should be done by Sermonrecorder automatically...

Recording sources

All standard Windows sound inputs can be selected as recording source. ASIO devices are also supported, but I have not been able to test this axcept with the ASIOforAll driver, which emulates an ASIO interface.
The available interfaces are enumerated at startup and can be selected in the settings dialog. The user can detect if the right interface is set by watching if the signal meter in the main window acts on noise in the sound system.

Recording destinations, File types

Recordings are encoded and written to disk just-in-time, MP3 encoding is done using LAME.
There are 4 different destinations for the recording, which are written to at the same time:

• mp3-High: A MP3 file in Stereo, bps can be set and is 128kbps by default.

• mp3-Low: A MP3 file in Mono, bps can be set and is 32kbps by default. This is intended as size-optimized for download purposes.

• WAV: A 44,1kHz, 16 bit Stereo PCM file for any use, such as postprocessing...

• CD-Recording: A WAV file as the one above plus a cuesheet file, which can be used by CD burning tools to burn CDs directly.

MP3 ID3 Tags are used by default. Genre and Album can be adjusted to the user's needs in the Setup form.

Naming of recorded files

The recorded files are written to temporary files in the first place, since the speaker's name and the subject may be entered during the recording and may be used in the final filename. At recording stop, all filenames are generated accordingly and the files are renamed.
If a required directory does not exist, it will be generated.
If a file already exists, the generated filename is extended, so that the files can be distinguished.

The available parameters are:

• %D = today's date (yyyy mm dd)
• %S = Speaker
• %IS = Speaker's Initials
• %T = Subject
• %yy = Year 00..99
• %yyyy = Year 0000..9999
• %M = Month 01..12
• %d = Day 01..31
• %h = Hour 01..12 (For use with %AMPM parameter)
• %AMPM = "AM" or "PM"
• %H = Hour 00..23
• %m = Minute 00..59
• %s = Second 00..59

The speaker's initials in the parameter are filtered using the folowing criteria:

1. The first charcter
2. all capital letters
3. letters following a space character
   This way, an entry like " Frank van der Waals" will be "FvdW" in %IS.

After these parameters in the filenames have been replaced at recording stop, a user-configurable replacer can be used to e.g. replace <space> characters by any desired character. I heard of a user who needed this in order to upload the recorded sermons to a cloud service,which didn't support space in file names.
The final file names and directories are then scanned for invalid caracters, which will be replaced by a "_".</space>

Commandline execution after Recording Stop

A freely configureable commandline call can be set up in the setup window, which will be executed after recording stopped.
All of the parameters above may be used, plus:

• %mp3_1 = file name of the MP3_1
• %mp3_2 = file name of the MP3_2
• %wav = file name of the wav file
• %cd = file name of the cuesheet file

Using these parameters, it is e.g. possible to call a batch file which uploads the download mp3 file to the webserver and starts the CD burning Software automatically with the right files.