[lug] sound recording roadblocks and solutions

[Neal McBurnett]

Once upon a time, D. Stimits <stimits at idcomm.com> wrote:
> > 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.

Thanks.  I tried this, and I don't doubt that it is correct, but then I
don't see why this doesn't work:

 cat /dev/audio > adev.wav
 cat adev.wav > /dev/audio
  sounds ok
 rawplay -v -f u8 -s 8000 adev.wav
  loud static for a fraction of the playing time
 rawplay -c 1 -v -f u8 -s 8000 adev.wav
  loud static


> > 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 package or is obsolete.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 The directory they gave is out of date, the final URL for the package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.

All dating from 1997 or earlier, so I'll trust that the more recent,
distributed apps are better unless I hear otherwise.  Thanks for
tracking it down though!

-Neal