Lars =?iso-8859-1?Q?Bj=F8rndal?= writes: > Interesting! Could you please tell us how you set up your system as a tape > recorder? Is the features available from the console? Which software > are you using, and so on...? I am not doing anything terribly unique. What I meant really is that I am using that system in place of buying a nice tape recorder like I might have done twenty or thirty years ago. You need to know which sound system your computer uses and then enable ALSA in your kernel. The idea is to only build the modules you need to support ALSA which stands for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture because including stuff that isn't on your computer will waste memory and maybe cause the system to hang while it looks for things that aren't there. Once you get alsa working, you can then install various sound utilities such as the alsa utilities like aplay and arecord, a mp3 player like mpg123 and mplayer to listen to streaming audio. You will also want amixer to control the settings on your sound card from the command line. You will need to make amixer print out all the possible controls and their settings and then you can set them to the way you need for whatever you are doing. ALSA which stands for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture is the heart of everything that has to do with sound in Linux. Get that working and lots of other neat things are available. Several people on this list have suggested different sound editing programs and the like but they all need ALSA so you need that first. One thing I use a lot is sox or Sound Exchange. It technically doesn't need a sound card because it is a data processing utility you can use to do some editing of files, modify the speed or pitch of recordings and readjust audio levels within certain limits. The command interface can be down-right ugly at times so get good with shell scripts and you will be happier with it. So, when I talk about using a computer as a tape recorder, that is kind of a figure of speech. I haven't yet found a good command-line player that, say, has a way of easily rewinding or fast-forwarding a .wav file, for example. mplayer will let you do that when it is running, but it only plays certain types of files so you can't use mplayer for everything. Generally, the computer lets you do a lot of things you only dreamed about doing with a conventional tape recorder. A few operations like fast-forward and rewind are different or hard to do due to the way digital sound technology works, but one certainly gets more bang for the Buck in the digital world than we used to get. Finally, Linux sets up a standard framework for the sound system that all the utilities like ecasound and mplayer use. You can actually play with this a bit without going to too much trouble. If you set your sound controls to record from the Line-in or Microphone jack and have a sound source ready, you can make a recording by simply typing cat /dev/dsp >somefile.dsp This will record sound at 8,000 samples per second with 8 bits per sample for as long as you have space on your disk drive. Just hit Control-C to stop the recording. To play it back, type cat somefile.dsp >/dev/dsp and you should begin to hear the recording you just made. Since it is at 8,000 samples per second and 8-bits per sample, it will be terrible for music and okay for voice. It is like recording tape at 15/16 inches per second instead of 7.5 or 15 IPS. In the digital world, the same natural rules apply plus a few more. The best sound quality uses the highest sampling rates and eats up much more media per second than does a low-fidelity recording. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK Systems Engineer OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list