Hello, I want to use the microphone on my computer but have no idea how to get started. I see people talking about all these weird things you need. Can someone just explain to me, and assume that i currently have none of the required tools although i really don't know what is required, how to get the sound from my mic to my computer. Hoefully, there's software out there without that ridiculous one minute thing in windows sound recorder. This is really important that I find out how to do this as I am writing a song to my girlfriend who just left me.

If you are using KDE you can try Krecord or Krec. Am not sure what apps there are with GNOME. Audacity is another alternative. I hope thats what you are looking for.

infact I was surprised that I could not find a simple answer for you. Searched quite a while before I realised it was harder than I imagined.

if you have alsa sound driver you need to enable Mic as a capture device
try the command
amixer set Mic cap
if you have sb live like me you also need to use the command
amixer set Capture cap 8

look at the output from amixer or look at kmix or whatever to see what to capture to turn on
once capture is turned on you can hear microphone sound out of the speakers
then try
arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav ~/test.wav
to record a short sound and
aplay ~/test.wav
to hear it play

once you have that working move on to use the program "audacity" for your project
there are lots of good recording programs but audacity is easiest to start with and doesn't require any other
fancy sound servers or whatever

if you get stuck along the way just ask again

Hi all

these are my first crawlings ...

amixer set Mic cap
amixer set Capture cap 8
arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav ~/test.wav

I can hear my mic in my headset, but

aplay ~/test.wav

yields 10s of silence

Is it possible that I've futzed everything by playing with the SuSE/Gnome Volume Control before hand?

Thanks in advance

audio

This may not be helpful at all, but I recall reading something about needing to be user 'root' to record sound in some Linux distribution kernels. You might try to find out.

If you get it to work, will you post to explain what you did to get it to work?
And, if you are using the ALSA driver, what version are you using?

BTW - Have you thought about putting your music on tape and sending the tape?

I did eventually get it to work. Although exactly how, I don't remember right now. On the good side. My girlfriend and I have been back together since around February.

Hello all,
A week of frustration and fury of not getting sound "recorded" on linux.

Tonight I joined this site and opened "all" messages relating to sound. Fiddled with all sorts of settings including IRQ changes in BIOS. But no avail.

This particular post, helped me try KILLing artsd and it sort of worked.

Here is the story:

RHEL4 , AMD Athlon 2800+ , info from my /etc/sysconfig/hwconf:
driver: snd-via82xx
desc: "VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 AC97 Audio Controller"
KDE -> control center -> sound and multimedia -> sound system -> [ ] Enable sound system (disabled state).


Tried krec, gnome-sound-record, nothing, I can hear my own voice while recording but get silence only during play back. Spent a week like that. Used aumix as well and raised the IGAIN in it to 100%. Record source is MIC with 100% volume. While various fiddling I tried:

[kamran@homeserver ~]$ arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav foo.wavRecording WAVE 'foo.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz, Stereo

[kamran@homeserver ~]$ aplay foo.wav
Playing WAVE 'foo.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz, Stereo
[kamran@homeserver ~]$


Once I gave the aplay foo.wav command, I got silence and system sort of got stuck on this command prompt.

Killed the artsd and the moment I killed it, I heard my recorded sound from the speakers.

[root@homeserver ~]# ps aux | grep arts
guest 5650 0.0 0.8 21792 6840 ? S Mar01 0:00 /usr/bin/artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -a toss -d -r 44100 -b 16 -s 60 -m artsmessage -c drkonqi -l 3 -f
kamran 9374 0.4 2.4 36008 18668 ? S 00:39 0:09 /usr/bin/artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -a alsa -b 16 -m artsmessage -c drkonqi -l 3 -f
root 9570 0.1 0.9 22960 7136 ? S 01:10 0:00 /usr/bin/artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -s 60 -m artsmessage -l 3 -f
root 9585 0.0 0.0 5192 700 pts/1 R+ 01:13 0:00 grep arts
[root@homeserver ~]# kill -9 5650
[root@homeserver ~]# kill -9 9374
[root@homeserver ~]# kill -9 9570
[root@homeserver ~]# ps aux | grep arts
root 9587 0.0 0.0 4588 688 pts/1 S+ 01:14 0:00 grep arts
[root@homeserver ~]#



I have not done much testing / recording since I got my recorded message played back, through the command line though. KREC still sounds silent! Just wanted to let you all know. Hope this helps.

Regards,
Kamran Azeem
RHCE # 804005902117615

P.S. For me alsamixer didn't do a thing. And it's famous F4 key doesn't seem to work for me!