Back in 2006, a Mac User Group member was scheduled to give a two-hour presentation on 30 Apple Years. This was to be conducted in the auditorium of the College where we met at the time.
A week earlier he gathered a few tech-minded types and asked if anyone had any ideas on how to record the speech & still send it on to the PA system for all to hear.
I mentioned I had a pocket-sized MiniDisc recorder & microphone (the mic actually came with my very first Apple computer, a 1993 Mac Classic) and it could record at ½-speed to cover the envisaged time. I didn’t have it with me at the time, I brought it with me on the day of his presentation.
The recorder also had a voice-activated recording mode, which was put to very good use.
He put the recorder in the hip pocket of his jeans with the mic in his shirt pocket. Then there was an Toslink digital audio lead running from the recorder’s combined mode audio out port to the room’s PA system.
I fiddled the sensitivity of the voice-activated mic setup, made sure it was in long-play mode with good batteries & an 80-minute disc inserted.
At the end of the day there was 30 minutes of free space on the MiniDisc. Next I imported the recording to my Mac - only possible via an audio cable with 3.5mm plugs at each end. The .aiff file was then imported to iTunes & burned to a pair of high quality Matshita Gold CDs in the same format.
The presenter was very pleased with the result & I’ve just observed that the file itself in iTunes is stored in my iCloud Music Library, courtesy of iTunes Match.