[CS-FSLUG] Church Software Project

[Clinton Evans]

For many years, my Church in Ottawa has been providing audio recordings of the 
service on cassette tapes. It is clear that cassettes are approaching the end 
of their product life and we wanted a CD-based system in place before 
cassettes cease to be available.

I volunteer for our library which, traditionally, has distributed the tapes. 
Being a Presbyterian Church, we NEVER challenge tradition so we wanted to 
produce CDs in the library, too.

The system that has materialized, so far, works as follows:

1)	The person who operates the sound system captures the
	service audio on his OSX Mac laptop.

2)	After the service, he runs a shell script which pipes the data
	to a Linux machine in the library. This machine captures
	the raw file and also produces a processed file, suitable for
	immediate burning. Optionally, it burns a couple of CDs of
	that service, automatically.

3)	We keep past services on disk and burn copies, while people
	wait, after the service.

Steps (1) and (2) are so tightly coupled to the operation of our Church that 
the options for using them elsewhere are pretty limited. However, item (3) 
may provide opportunity for a little cross-pollination.

I originally planned to use a music database, e.g. Juk, to index the audio 
files and burn them, as required. This system is in use, now, but has not 
proved very satisfactory.

I looked at a number of programs but did not see anything I really liked. In 
all cases, the program did lots of things I did not want, with the associated 
complexities, and did not things I did want. In the end, I decided to write 
my own code.

Currently, I have the database editor in a working condition but with some 
planned features still missing. The searching and burning code is a little 
behind the editor but it should be working in a few weeks.

Here are some details:

Language:		Python
GUI Toolkit:	qt, pyqt
Database:		Zope object database

I am also considering libbatch to run the conversion and burning queues. 
Alternatively, I may write my own queues.

I expect other folk must want to organize audio service recordings on disk and 
burn them, to order. I am interested in the possibility of collaboration and 
would appreciate any advice on getting such a project going.

Clinton