Live Audio to CD recording

[Joris Dobbelsteen]

Dear,

Starting with a situation sketch.

At this moment I have a system that performs live audio recording to a
CD. All data from the audio card is immediately recorded to a CD-ROM.
However, at a few occasions, something has gone wrong resulting in an
unrecoverable CD. Since the recording a ceremonies at the local church,
there is only one chance to get it right.

The recording system is a standard computer (Via Epia) with a heavily
modified keyboard (only a few buttons) and a 20 character LCD display.
It runs Debian linux (Ubuntu is similar) and has some custom shell
script to glue everything together.
Since it only has a 1.5 disk, there was no space left to keep an on-disk
copy. This is going to be changed to a 20 GB hard disk soon, making
on-disk copies possible (finally). I think I like compression too, but
it is not a requirement.

And finally the questions:

* Is there a software project available that does/tries to do what I
want?

* At this point I'm doing a "brec <audio card> | cdrecord -audio <cdrw>
-" (sort of). I think I can fit in "tee" to split of the audio to a
file. Is there any better way to perform these steps?
I would like to wait several minutes before actually starting to burn
the audio, making it more resistent against human mistakes (start
quickly followed by stop).
Secondly I would like the on-disk image to be a little bit compressed,
but this is only an optional requirement. Processor already forces a
speed instead of compression tradeoff.

* Even better, is there any language that I can more directly interface
with the CD-ROM drive (using some API), instead of hoping to get the
cdrecord output interpreted right...

* Does anyone have a patch for cdrecord readily available to completely
remove the "wait 5 seconds before continuing" part?

For the record:
I am a software engineer, so doing some programming and/or modifications
are no problem at all. However it modification has to be done in a very
short time (this week or next week is planned).
The system has a Via C3 1 GHz "Nehemiah" processor, so power is a bit
more limited than on most desktops.


Many thanks in advance,

- Joris Dobbelsteen