[jpoprock]

I posted this in the Mac forum too, only because we could go the Mac route (I"m a mac user, but they aren't).

My church is wanting to start recording the band. But to be honest, they aren't exactly very good at even MIXING the house mix we have now. But that is another issue on it's own. Because I'm one of the few out of 2200 people with any recording experience, they have sorta put me in charge. Well, I'm not really all that qualified, because I know NOTHING about live sound really. But they have the monster Yamaha DM2000v2 board. We use this for the house sound and record mixes via a different "layer" or "Matrix" I think. I'm not sure. Anyway, the record mixes or "board mixes" as I know them to be are quite rotten. Mainly because they don't really work at making them better, and also because no one there really knows how. But they think that if they had a "studio" they could somehow come out of this board to another system, capture the audio (which could be up to like 32 tracks AT ONCE) then edit, mix, fix it all later.

My job is to figure out how to do this and what gear to buy. I wanted to start out with baby steps and work our way up. I didn't think buying $10,000 worth of gear was the right answer, when there really isn't any one available to even run it properly. I was looking at coming out of the DM2000 via cards either analog or digital to maybe a Roland 24 track unit or even Pro Tools. The DM2000 supports Pro Tools quite nicely from what I've read. But I have some questions.

Would we have to have a monster Mac or PC to be able to capture 24-32 tracks of live audio at once?? Oh, and i'm talking 24-32 tracks at like 24bit/44.1 and for like 30 minutes!!!!

What kind of Pro Tools system would be need to be able to capture that much audio at once?

I'm pretty sure if we go this route, we'd have to go with something that accepted digital inputs, etc. The DM2000 can send a variety of ways. Digital, Cat5, etc.

And hey, it's their money and they want to spend it. Doesn't matter if I think they are totally underqualified to take advantage of the technology. They want it,and I need to help them spend their money. However, I was hoping to be able to start out small and work our way up. But it seems that because they use that stupid DM2000, it's almost impossible to do anything "Small" now.

Thanks!

Jason