[LAD] audio recording through pipe using mplayer and sox sometimes has incorrect speed

[Justin Smith]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 5:53 AM, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Arnold Obdeijn <arnold.obdeijn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am using mplayer, sox and tee to capture streaming internet radio
>> and send it both to an audio recognition program and to a file
>> (recording).
>> This is how I do it:
>>
>> mplayer -playlist {url}  -nocache -af volnorm -msglevel all=1 -nolirc
>> -vc dummy -vo null -ao pcm:file={$fifo1} &
>>
>> sox -S {$fifo1} -c 1 -r 8000 -t wav - resample | tee {$recording} |
>> tee {$fifo2} & ......
>>
>> $fifo1 and $fifo2 are named pipes, $fifo2 is processed by an audio
>> recognition program. The idea is that the audio is converted to low
>> quality wav (8000Hz mono) after which it is fed to the program and
>> simultaneously recorded.
>
> Not that I want to suggest anything to massively off-topic, but I hope
> you realize that this is a perfect example of the kind of scenario
> that JACK was designed to handle.
>
> Sharing streaming data between programs via pipes is not a great idea
> - the buffer associated with a pipe is rather small, and scheduling
> delays for the programs reading from the pipe can cause data loss etc.
> This doesn't matter if both the writer to the pipe and the reader can
> both run "as needed", but when one of them is connected to an i/o
> source (eg. the network , or an audio interface) which doesn't buffer
> very much and has real deadlines, the whole design is almost destined
> to fail or at least be very fragile.
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Seconding the jack recommendation, I would recommend using xmms with
the jack output plugin, and record its output with jack_capture.
Mplayer also has a jack output plugin, but xmms has better playlist
support and onscreen controls.