Re: Recording on Debian/GNOME (Sid)

[Pascal Bonesh <firms@tiscali.ch>]

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 22:37 +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:
> I have sound output (alsa), but I can't seem to get sound input (alsa as
> well) to work properly, at least not so that the Sound Recorder can be
> used. I do have some blinking lights in the Recording Level Monitor, so
> I guess something is going right. Any tips/pointers?

I just played around with sound myself (etch) yesterday and I noticed
that some modules were not loaded. And without them sound-recording
doesn't seem to work.

Here is what I did to get sound recording to work:
# alsaconfig
to make sure sound card and modules are properly loaded (you most likely
won't need that)
# modprobe snd-pcm-oss;modprobe snd-mixer-oss;modprobe snd-seq-oss
It doesn't *seem* to be card specific. But if your computer blows up,
then you have been warned now :)

After that you can test if alsa-recording is working:
# arecord -f cd -d 10 -t wav -N test.wav
which records sound for 10 seconds and saves it

After that I check if gstreamer is set up properly:
#  gst-launch-0.8 osssrc ! vorbisenc ! filesink location=input.ogg
Which does the same thing as above, but encodes the input in ogg-vorbis

I don't exactly know what modules need to be loaded, but the above does
the trick on etch.

In addition to all that I noticed that certain other things affect
recording:
# gnome-volume-control
In the capture tab, the "Capture" Device needs to be enabled (of
course), and (on this computer) on the Tab "Switches" "stereo mic"
disables recording completely if set to true. The only things enabled
here are Mic Boost and external Amplifier (if you have those)

Hope this gets you started...