Silly Solid Swound System — Recording How-To

How does one go about recording the Silly Solid Swound Sytem at Saturday nights when you are expected to be out in the wild (or even on Mallorca)? There are endless possibilities and combinations of equipment, but I want to give you a short overview about the equipment and tools I use to get shiny, well-cut audio files in best possible quality on my machines.

Hardware: Digital SAT, Soundcard, Computer

The best possible recording source would of course be the DAT tapes that Makossa and/or Sugar B use to record the shows (the first shows seem to have been recorded on metal tapes, but now they are using DAT tapes). Anyway: Sitting at home, your best bet at the moment seems to be a DVB card tuned to Radio FM4 and directly save the MPEG2 audio stream to disk (the bitrate seems to be 256kbps here). I currently use a normal set-top box digital satellite receiver that has its analog (use digital if possible) output connected to the line-in of the computer's sound card (a SB Live! Player 5.1 - there are surely better alternatives around).

Software: Debian, cron, alsarecord, flac and friends

Recording is done on a Debian GNU/Linux box. I use a cronjob to schedule the recording, which is handled by a shell script specifically written for this purpose and the wonderful alsarecord command-line tool. Effectively, this leaves me with a ~2.3 GB big .wav file in my home directory early on Sunday. This file is then manually split up with the help of a modified wavbreaker (my custom version). This results in a bunch of .wav files which contain the shows played the night before. These files are then processed with another shell script, intelligently named wav-norm-flac-mp3-ogg, which does exactly that: Normalize the .wav file, encode it into FLAC format, then generate .mp3 (for iPod) and .ogg (for everything else) out of it. Normalizing the file is done with the help of normalize. Why three seperate audio formats? FLAC for archival purposes (lossless), MP3 for the iPod and OGG for sending the shows. The final step is to run another shell script, commenter which populates the Vorbis comment tag of the OGG files with information about the episode.