slightly off-topic: Podcasting software and workflow for a weekly church sermon

[brendan-j2ZBMMpYpO5eoWH0uzbU5w at public.gmane.org (Brendan Kidwell)]

I'm asking this here because we're a pretty knowledgeable group when it
comes to applying free software to solve real-world problems.

I'm helping my pastor rebuild her web site (using WordPress), and when I
suggested the idea of making an audio podcast of the weekly sermon, and then
demonstrated that we could do it with just about any hardware (PDA, voice
recorder, etc.) she wants to run with the idea.

I did I trial run using my Blackberry to record -- from the pew -- and it
came out "surprisingly good". When we really go live, she'll have her
iPhone, a recording-capable mp3 player, or a Digital Voice Recorder in the
pulpit.

I converted the Blackberry's audio files to WAV. (Blackberry records in 10
minute blocks, and I started recording quite early.) Then using Audacity, I
concatenated them, cropped, amplified, and exported to MP3.

When I tried to demonstrate this post-production workflow to her using her
Windows laptop, we ran into some trouble with Audacity: For our purposes,
the Audacity interface is confusing and oddly inconsistent between Windows
and Linux. Additionally, using the LAME Export plugin recommended by the
Audacity web site, we were unable to specify quality (VBR) instead of
bandwidth (CBR) for the output, which annoyed me. You CAN do this in
Audacity at least under Ubuntu Linux.

I'm looking for a tool or a collection of tools that can do just this much
and not necessarily anything more fancy:

1. Concatenate WAV files into a single project. (Assume we are able to
convert the recording device's output to uncompressed WAV.)
2. Click on a power/time graph to make a Mark for the Start of the content,
preview the mark out loud and refine if necessary via click-and-drag.
3. Do the same for a Mark for the End.
4. Remove data before and after the two Marks.
5. Amplify (scale linearly) to maximum volume.
6. Export to VBR mp3 audio with user-supplied metadata tags.

I want my pastor to be able to do all this without my help on a Windows
laptop in a few minutes, but ultimately I'll probably be the one doing it
every week, using Linux exclusively.

The final step -- publishing the mp3 file on the web site as a podcast -- is
trivial using WordPress, so we don't need to talk about that here.

It occurs to me that I might be able to do this by converting to mp3 format
in the first step and using Mp3DirectCut (Windows or WINE) for the rest of
the workflow. < http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html > Mp3DirectCut losslessly
supports the actions I want to perform and has the kind of minimalist UI I
want.

I guess what I'm asking for is "here's what worked for me" stories. Does
anyone have any better ideas or suggestions? If I find any good howtos, I'll
answer my own question and post them here.

Thanks!