OS X Mountain Lion and Photobooth issue:

My wife has a MacMini in her music classroom and used PhotoBooth everyday multiple times a day to record her students performing. The kids loved seeing their recording and being prompted with the countdown on the SmartBoard.

This summer, we took our personal MacMini from the school and updated the software to the latest OS 10.7 release. After this last OS 10.7 update, PhotoBooth stops recording audio 30 seconds into the recording. The first 30 seconds are fine, but then it sounds like someone pulled the plug on the recording. I have setup her classroom with a M-Audio Mobile Pre with two condenser mics that are hanging from the ceiling, a Logitech USB camera, and an audio amplifier connected to the Mini's audio output. Last school year we did not have any issues and recoded hundreds of performances. This year it has only worked fine a few times, as long it is the first program that is run. Once another program like DVD player, iTunes, or the HoverCam Flex software is used, something goes wrong and PhotoBooth stops recording the audio.

We have tried PRAM reset, reloading OS from combo update. Trying different settings on the Audio MIDI Setup (input can only be 2 ch 24 bits at 44.1KHz and output is 2 ch 16-bits at 44.1KHz). I would go at night and try different things and get it to work, but then the next day after using DVD Player, iTunes, and PhotoBooth, PhotoBooth would loose its audio recording.

I even bought a 2011 MacMIni with a fresh install of Mountain Lion 10.8.5 and had the same issue the first day. It also had many freezes, so I had to take it back home for debug.

What is worse is that the new principal saw this happening in one of her classroom visits and now her impressions of Macs is very low. We had a hard time getting a couple of iMacs and since the teachers are not trained in computer, they sit idle. We probably will not be getting more Macs in this highly Dell school system.

How can I fix this? Is there another simple porgram like PhotoBooth for recording audio performances with USB microphones and USB cameras? Ruuning QuickTime or iMovie is to complicated for a teacher that just needs to keep a lot of elemtary school kids on tasks.