low-resource recording application

[greymalkin]

well it's that time again for me to do another wedding video. I'd like to patch the audio feed from the mixer into my laptop this time to try and get a good clean audio signal to mix in with the more ambient camera mic's audio. My fear is that the laptop will hiccup and lose a peice of the audio. I'll take all precautionary measures by killing all processes/applications that are non-essential, but I also wanted to see about using a program that just records audio and uses very low resources. The laptop is a 1.7ghz centrino w/a 60gb hd.

The other question i have is would the pc be able to hang with recording .wav or should i find something that records to a compressed format...of course that will eat up cpu time...

Any suggestions for such an endeavor would be greatly appreciated.

[edDV]

Audacity to WAV

[SingSing]

Laptop is the wrong device to record long session of audio. Use a micro-recorder and just let it rip.

[greymalkin]

I know a dedicated stand-alone recorder would be best. I was just trying to work with what i've already got. The speaker will be adequately amplified so the camcorders should pick it up fine, I just wanted a clean feed and to know if my chances of getting a 30 min. ceremony without hiccups would be pretty good, taking the necessary precautions and assuming I have a clean load on my machine .

[mats.hogberg]

Defrag your HDD before you start recording, so it doesn't have to skip&jump all over the drive while capturing the audio. But you know how computers are - they are bound to hiccup when you least want 'em to!

/Mats