My stereo came with a USB outlet to connect to my computer. However, my hard drive is a POS and will only run Linux. Now how can I set my stereo up so I can play music or any sound in Linux and hear it? I have two auxilary ports if this helps.


Thanks, randyriver10.

Probably best to connect it to the 'line in' on your soundcard.
You can use most ot the audio controls on your PC for volume etc - all you'd have to do then is get up and switch radio stations/Cd's when you want a change.

Could you elaborate on this statement? What does that mean?


You should be able to connect the out from your sound card to the RCA jack inputs on your stereo and then use xmms to play songs or you can run the out from your stereo to the aux. inputs on your
card to record sounds, but be careful, your stereo could blow out the sound card.

Never even thought of that. Could it really blow out the sound card? I could see it if you were sending music from a stereo into the sound card.

yea what seems weird here is that you are inputing the stereo to the computer, seems like it would be the other way around. you definitly do not want to send an amped signal to the computer.

i always controlled my stereo with the computer, outputting from the computer to the stereo...i cant think of a reason to go the other way.

most sound cards have a line in for mic inputs and such, dunno about a stereo input though. you put to much electricity to anything i will fry.

I think if you're running a line level signal (e.g. headphone socket) to your soundcard input then you'll be ok - not likely to break it physically. It'll just saturate when you record stuff but it'll be obvious when that happens, because it will sound distorted. Just reduce the volume and try again.

I was not sure exactly how you wanted it hooked up. I have the outs from my sound card going into the RCA jacks on my stereo. If you go the other way to record from the stereo to the computer you run the risk of sending to much power into the soundcard from the stereo.

I concur... unless you find a way of plugging speaker wire into your sound card there is not enough voltage to blow it. Admittedly there may be a total POS sound card out there I'm not aware of that would have such a problem.

Does anyone have any experience with recording the raw input (say, from the line in) to hard drive? I've been playing with tools like rawrec and brec, but so far have managed to create extremely large files which seem to contain silence...

I'm lacking some basic understanding of mixer setups. I don't know how, but any input on the line in comes straight out of my speakers. This is a nice magical touch for listening to stuff from a minidisc player, for example, but I would like to understand how this happens. I'm sure it will help in me figuring out how to record the input.

Thats what I am going to start to try pretty soon. I am sure you can control the input through aumix or xmms. I want to record from my cd and cassette to hard drive but havent had the time to horse around yet.

Umm the output is in the form on PC speakers, the input is in the form of AV jacks.

It is OK then, you only have to play around with your mixer settings a bit, to get a reasonable recording level.

What mixer do you use? If you have KDE, you probably have KAMix, where there is a "Capture" tab, where you can select the source of recording (set this to "Line"), and the recording level with the "Capture" level control.

If you want to exclude any interferences with internal sound sources, you should mute "CD" and "Mic" on the "Ext sound source" tab (but do not mute "Line" there, and the "Master" control on the "Playback" tab, if you want to monitor the recorded sound).

I use command-line tools arecord or wavrec for recording. The resulting file will be really big, but you can convert it to mp3 with lame.