[lug] sound recording roadblocks and solutions

[Alan Robertson]

"D. Stimits" wrote:
> 
> Neal McBurnett wrote:
> >
> > I'm amazed at how hard it has been to find a way to record audio
> > in linux.  So I started writing a question to the lug.  As
> > so often happens, the process of writing good questions resulted
> > in figuring out most of the answers I was looking for.
> >
> > I'm currently running redhat 6.1.  [Yeah, I'll upgrade to 6.2
> > when I free up some disk space - sigh]
> >
> > The sound howto says to just cat /dev/audio to a file.  This
> > results in files that are very small, and which can be played back by
> > catting back to /dev/audio, but which other recommended tools (see
> > below) can't seem to handle at all.  I can't figure out what
> > the sampling rate or bits/sample are, they seem to be even less that
> > 8000 Hz, 8 bits/sample.
> 
> 8 bits/sample is resolution. 8 bits will give good quality, but maybe
> not what you want if you are working with good music.
> 
> 8000 Hz is the sample rate...how often those 8 bits are sampled.
> Generally, I think both the bits/sample and sample rate must be matched
> if you are mixing sounds.
> 
> >
> > The sound howto (March 1999) also suggests a tool called "vrec" which
> > is not part of my redhat 6.1 system.  No package of that name is
> > visible anywhere and we searches with google haven't led me to any
> > code (just some old man pages), so I'm guessing it is in some other
> > package or is obsolete.
> 
> Found this link, and snippet:
> http://botes2.tesre.bo.cnr.it/Services/Local/RedHat-FAQ/DOCS/sound2.html
> For editing/recording sound
>   vrec       -- link to vplay
> 
> Apparently vrec is just a symbolic link to vplay.
> 
> This leads to:
> http://www.btv-jena.de/softlist.en/vrec.html
> 
> Which leads to:
> vplay and vrec are available  via  anonymous  ftp  in  the
>       PCSP-Sounddriver  package from ftp.informatik.hu-berlin.de
> 
> The directory they gave is out of date, the final URL for the package
> is:
> ftp://ftp.informatik.hu-berlin.de/pub/Linux/hu-sound/
> 
> Let me know if it is any good...I might be interested in it later.
> 
> >
> > Downloading krecord sends me on another unsuccessful search for
> > libstdc++-libc6.1-2.so.3.
> 
> This comes with C++. Do you have g++ (try "which g++")? Probably the lib
> is in:
> /usr/lib/
> possibly with a minor variation of name. My RH 6.2 is
> libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2.
> 


This is a library incompatability issue.  I've seen it before.  The package
you're trying to load is probably a SuSE package.  Try grabbing the
.src.rpm, and doing an rpm --rebuild on it.

	-- Alan Robertson
	   alanr at suse.com