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List:       kde-multimedia
Subject:    Questions about sound recording and editing under GNU/Linux
From:       Jérôme Loisel <loisel () videotron ! ca>
Date:       2001-01-18 20:11:24
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Hi there!

This is not directly related to aRts... But people on this list obviously 
know a lot about audio under GNU/Linux, so this is the best place for me to 
ask. And it could give you insights about real-world audio problems some 
users have under GNU/Linux... and maybe inspire you to code something to 
resolve them. :-)

I have a radio show. I am building a website for that radio show and want to 
offer for download audio clips of interviews from the show. I have audio 
cassette recordings. Si I got an adaptor to plug my tape deck into my audio 
card (SB16-compatible antique) and tried recording. It works under Windows... 
but not under GNU/Linux.

I tried several things... (See post-scriptum if interested) Nothing so far 
has really worked. Can anyone tell me if it is really possible to do audio 
recording and editing under GNU/Linux? Are there any good GUI programs to do 
this?

Thank you very much everyone for your time, and sorry I took so long. I look 
forward to hearing solutions to my problem other than the obvious "do it in 
Windows" one.

Cheers,

Jérôme Loisel


PS: If you are interested, what follows is a summarized account of what I 
have tried so far.

I first tried grecord. All I get are 0.1 second-long clips, and the author is 
unreachable. I wanted to try krecord et al., but I don't have KDE 1.X lying 
around anymore. And KDE 2.0 does not seem to have audio recording and editing 
programs. I then looked at Freshmeat. Most apps would not compile, install or 
run. I went to read the audio howto, and then tried as it recommended wavrec, 
now integrated into mpegrec. That one compiled, but core dumps upon execution.

What finally worked was doing "cat /dev/audio > sound.wav" and hitting CTRL-C 
when I'm done. Archaic, but it works... sort of. Now, I have an unedited wav 
file. But when I try playing it with xmms or kaiman, I get no results (not 
even an error message). At least "cat sound.wav > /dev/audio" does what it 
should. It's a start!

So now I need to edit the file. Specifically, I need to remove the beginning 
and the end of the file so I just have the interview. Then, I have this pipe 
dream of somehow filtering out the background noise (a loud humming). I try 
opening the file with grecord again and get a core dump. I try a few other 
programs and none work. I finally try mxv, which reveals itself as the 
best-behaved app so far... at least I get an error message: "Unknown or 
invalid soundfile magic number: 488512797".

Am I being stupid again? Am I doing something wrong? Is it my sound card, 
maybe? I can go by a more recent vanilla SB-32 or something if that will help.
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