need help

[tejanoroo]

I do seminars, mostly in hotels and conference centers, I realize this is geared more to music but many of you will be able to help.
I need to record these seminars while I am doing them.
I want to use a laptop, can anyone give me some advice on the best most portable way to do this as well as what equipment and software would be best? Thankyou

 

[AlChuck]

I think it's a bad idea to use a laptop for this purpose. They are just not reliable enough. The chance that the recording software will hiccup and blow your recording somewhere along the way is too great once the time span gets to be much greater than the length of a typical pop song. Maybe if you had someone who could stop and start it and so record your speaking gigs in sections...

Those new portable MiniDisk recorders I've seen around are fantastic. They are super portable -- roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes. They are comparitively inexpensive -- a couple-a-few hundred bucks. They have incredibly long recording times (5 hours, I believe) if you choose the most extreme level of data compression. You would not want to record a symphony like this, but a speaking voice would be fine. At the shorter-length/lesser-data-compression end of it, they sound marvelously good. Some have USB ports so you can transfer the recording as a file straight to a PC or Mac for editing, etc. With those that don't, you can always record it through the standard analog outs into a standard soundcard's audio inputs.

Here's one: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...26948-7728733?v=glance&s=electronics&n=172282