solved, followup: deb for audacity 2.0 for Debian 5.0? (was Re: Debian 5.0: Capturing audio from a web page?)

[Randy Kramer <rhkramer@gmail.com>]

(Top posting this general reply which is pretty much a thank you--a few 
responses to specific suggestions are interspersed below.)

Thanks to all who replied!

I've now found audacity and figured out how to use it (some problems learning 
because the manual is for version 2.0, and the latest version I could find 
for Debian 5.0 is version 1.3.5 beta--some differences in terminology and 
screen layout).

For now, audacity 1.3.5 is doing the job.  For some future things I want to do 
(capturing some tracks from vinyl), audacity 2.0 has some additional features 
which may be useful (e.g., normalizing tracks individually instead of "in 
common", the latter potentially inadvertently changing the balance between 
tracks).

If anybody knows of a place to apt-get audacity 2.0 for Debian 5.0, that would 
be a help!

On Monday 25 June 2012 08:11:10 am Darac Marjal wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 01:28:37PM -0400, Randy Kramer wrote:
> > I want to capture some audio from a web page.

> I think I would start by looking at how the web page is playing the
> audio. If it's a simple background audio file (e.g. an <embed> or
> <object> tag), then you should be able to simply fetch the file
> yourself.
>
> If, however, the audio is being streamed by a flash/java/silverlight/etc
> player, then you will need to look deeper.

AFAICT, the audio was being streamed.  (The particular web pages were 
available only last week and are now gone.)

> > Even answering (or telling me how to answer) some simple questions, like:
> >    * is my system using aRts or ALSA?
>
> Conceivably, it could be using both. ALSA is the set of sound drivers
> that the kernel uses to talk to your sound card; aRts, esd and nowadays
> pulse are all audio managers that sit on top of OSS or ALSA.
>
> You can probably see what sound systems you have by playing a wav file
> through "play" (OSS), "aplay" (ALSA), "artsplay" (aRts), "esdplay"
> (ESounD) and "paplay" (Pulse). If any commands don't exist, or don't
> play the wav, then you're not using that system.

...

> I would suggest using OSS (play, record etc). IIRC, Debian 5.0 would
> have been around the time that ALSA was supplanting OSS, so either
> you're still using OSS or you'll have ALSA with OSS compatibility
> enabled.

Per your suggestion, I tried those, and only play and aplay work, so I'm 
guessing that you're right, I have ALSA with OSS compatibility enabled.

Thanks again to all!
Randy Kramer