I am currently recording live music to a Windows XP laptop from the venue's soundboard to a single WAV file, then after the show is over, I encode it to an MP3 file using LAME. From there I dump the MP3 onto a USB flash memory stick. Doing this as timely as possible is important, but the solution is lacking.
I am looking for an existing audio recorder (or set of tools) that will allow me to do the following:
- Record realtime directly to MP3, bypassing the WAV step.
- Between songs during the performance, allow me to stop recording the current MP3 file and immediately begin recording the next one.
- If step #1 isn't possible, then once I perform step #2, the previous WAV file starts getting encoded to MP3 while the current song is being recorded (this is not strictly necessary, but would be nice if it won't tax the system while recording the current song).
- As soon as the MP3 is encoded, allow me to tag it with the pertinent artist/song/date/venue metadata.
- A bonus for step #4 would be to have a facility where the metadata could be prepared in advance, say, in a text file, and the application would tag the MP3s from that file.
What I want to end up with is a USB stick with each song as it's own MP3 file, with tags, as quickly as possible after the show. Encoding the WAVs to MP3 after the entire performance is okay, but it would be nice to be able to do it on-the-fly. Manually tagging each MP3 at that point would be a bit of a chore, though, unless it could be automated.
I began looking at Sound Forge 8, which allows me to hit "M" to place markers during the recording, but I can't access any of the marked data until the entire recording is finished, so that won't work.
Any suggestions/ideas very welcome, thank you!!
Regards,
Gary