On 9/7/06, Johannes Mario Ringheim <jri(a)broadpark.no> wrote: These are all excellent suggestions, thank you very much. -- Josh Lawrence http://www.hardbop200.com

On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 12:49 -0400, Rob wrote: Suboptimal (requires OSS emulation). Better: arecord 4hourrecording.wav & sleep 14400; killall -INTR arecord NB: This will record 8 bit mono at 8000Hz. Use "arecord -f cd" for better quality. Lee

i was wondering isnt it best to have a compressed output like ogg or flac? i dont have such experience but how much of GB are we talking about with 4 hours of uncompressed audio? On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 15:33 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

Hallo, glauber alex dias prado hat gesagt: // glauber alex dias prado wrote: If you use ecasound as I recommended (and not the much less reliable arecord that's all the rage in this thread's recent mails), you can just replace .wav with .ogg in your command line and you will get a compressed ogg-file recording instead. Same with mp3, if you have configured an encoder in ecasoundrc. Ciao -- Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__

On Friday 08 September 2006 10:28, Dave Phillips wrote: Well? We've all been posting one-liners, so let's see one that uses ecasound. I didn't even know about asound when I started this thread, and I thought ecasound was some big horrific Tk application. Rob

Hi, Could you explain what you mean with "much less reliable" ? I often use arecord, and find it very reliable. I have never used ecasound, and since I often use arecord and oggenc in different settings, piping them together was the logical solution for me... And frankly, I find my arecord / oggenc oneliner (even simpler than I wrote in the first place, thanks to Paul Davis pointing out the -d flag) rather clear and straightforward. So, rather than learning a new application, I combine two I already know, including their command line arguments. And I could easily add other applications to the chain. arecord -f cd -d 14400 | oggenc -q 6 -o 4hours.ogg - arecord -f cd -d 14400 | lame -q 6 - 4hours.mp3 Anyway, as often, many ways to accomplish the same task! maarten

On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 15:44 +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote: Yep - arecord is not meant to be very useful - it's a reference implementation for ALSA application developers and for testing drivers. Lee

Hi, On Sat, 9 Sep 2006, Maarten de Boer wrote: arecord (and most other tools mentioned in this thread) do not separate disk i/o from audio i/o. Thus if disk i/o blocks for longer than the size of audio i/o buffering, you'll get an xrun (= a break in the recording in this case). How big of an issue this is depends on your kernel, disk i/o subsystem, and the amount of audio buffering used (which again depends on the driver, soundcard hw and the sampling parameters). Many soundcards (but not all!) allow to use quite big buffers, so in practise arecord et al will work without glitches (especially for low-bandwidth usage like recording one or two channels of CD-quality audio). Ecasound (as do many other apps, such as ardour, linuxsampler, etc), protect the audio i/o loop with multiple seconds of disk i/o buffering, thus they are able to guarantee reliable audio i/o even in extreme conditions (minimal audio i/o buffering to minimize latency + heavy system load). And then a separate issue is rt-scheduling. This is another safety measure to protect the audio i/o loop against badly behaving other processes. Couple of old links about this "why ecasound for recording" topic (btw; note the years, I've been repeating these things for over 5 years now! ;)): http://eca.cx/ecasound-list/2001/06/0016.html http://eca.cx/ecasound-list/2005/04/0038.html Sure, I use arecord a lot myself, too. Due to high visibility of ALSA, I think aplay/arecord have become the de facto applications for these tasks, so it probably makes more sense to focus energy on improving these tools than to market other options. But there might not be a huge need for change the tools, as mentioned earlier, with current kernels, and the common use cases (low-bandwidth recording/playback), arecord/aplay may be already good enough for most people. Btw, you can of course use ecasound for this as well: ecasound -f:16,2,44100 -t:14400 -r -i alsa -o stdout |oggenc -q 6 -o 4hours.ogg - ... plus you get separate buffering for the pipe (blocking on the oggenc pipe won't interfere with the recording process) and benefits of real-time scheduling (-r). -- links, my public keys, etc at http://eca.cx/kv

Maarten de Boer writes: Suggest you write a simple bash script that starts arecord with the params you want and writes to the file you want. Then, use the 'at' command to launch the script on a particular day at a particular time. -- Janina Sajka Phone: +1.202.595.7777 Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC http://CapitalAccessibility.Com Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada--Go to http://ScreenlessPhone.Com to learn more. Chair, Accessibility Workgroup Free Standards Group (FSG) janina(a)freestandards.org http://a11y.org