[linux-audio-user] Simple sound recording

[Tom Trebisky]

OK, here is what I want to do:

1) Take my linux laptop (now with Fedora core 1) and connect a
signal to the line-in jack and record audio to the laptop hard
drive.  Ideally I would like to do something like generate an
mp3 file to save hard drive space.  The goal here is to record
conference speakers and generate a CD containing MP3 files of
a days worth of people speaking.  (Using something like MP3 is
not essential, but would save space on the hard drive).  Since
all I am after is decent vocal audibility, I don't need exquisite
audio.  I will be getting a feed from a mixer.

My laptop is a Toshiba Tecra 8100, which has a Yamaha YMF-744B
(supposedly this was supported under ALSA 0.5.8)

2) What I have done so far ...
(apart from just get bewildered by all the audio jargon under
linux -- there is OSS, ALSA, JACK, ... maybe that is most of what
I have tripped over so far)

Find fedora RPM's of the alsa stuff (vintage 1.0.2) and load them
onto the laptop.

Read stuff on the ALSA site and linux-sound.org (which I am
still doing).

I was playing yesterday on my desktop system -- I installed a
Sound Blaster Live card and had it playing a CD using the OSS
drivers, now I will see if it still works with the ALSA drivers.
I couldn't get gnome-sound-recorder to do anything, but maybe
it will work with the ALSA drivers.  I am looking at an application
called qarecord (I like it since it has level meters -- I want to
see something move when I squak into a microphone and the gnome
recorder seems to have nothing like this), I have got the source,
but will have to build it.

So what am I asking?  Any help and pointers -- I don't want to make
this unduly complicated.  I wish I could just hook up a signal source
bring up a GUI, click on record and have a .wav file coming out of
stdout that I could pipe to some compression tool. Surely one
of you out there has done this -- my goal was to test fly this
Wednesday night, but so far I am a day and 1/2 into this and am
just getting deeper and deeper without seeing progress towards my
goal.

Thanks for anyone who has the time to offer some help.


	Tom

-- 
Tom Trebisky
MMT Observatory
University of Arizona -- Tucson
tom at mmto.org