Subject: [linux-audio-user] live recording on a laptop
From: Chris Majewski (majewski_AT_cs.ubc.ca)
Date: Thu Dec 20 2001 - 01:27:32 EET
Folks
I've borrowed a laptop to do some live recording on. It's a generic
AMD K-2 300 MHz machine with Yamaha OPL3-SA2 on-board sound. I rented
a pair of decent condenser mics and a powered mixer from the local
music shop, and made some recordings of my jazz combo which worked
pretty well. Meanwhile, millions of questions..
- Is this soundcard any good? Would there be a noticeable difference
with a $1000 pro-quality soundcard? Or is the bottleneck somewhere
else, e.g. electrical noise from the laptop?
- Which software to use for recording? So far I've been using the ALSA
drivers and recording with either 'arecord -w -m' or 'ecasound -c -b:128
-f:16,2,44100 -a:1 -i /dev/dsp'. I also tried 'arecord -w -M' (48 kHz)
and that worked. One advantage of these two is that they don't need X,
so I can boot in text mode only (I'm more of a kbd guy than a mouse
guy). A disadvantage is that I haven't figured out how to monitor what
I'm recording, the way you can on a tape deck. In fact, the minute I
start recording, I don't hear anything in my headphones other than a
faint clicking sound. The recording turns out fine when I play it
back, though. Same thing when I run the mixer (aumix or alsamixer):
the line input signal goes away, or plays intermittently. I have to
play a .wav file to revive it. Is this a "feature" of the OPL3-SA2?
- One thing I've discovered is "ecasignalview", which roughly tells me
if I have any clipped samples. Are clipped samples really bad? I mean,
is it OK to have a few of them? Other than that ecasignalview is
confusing and weird, so if there's anyone else out there using it,
maybe you can give me some tips.. for instance, how can I turn off the
cumulative statistics, and display statistics on a rotating
fixed-length sample instead (e.g., the last two seconds)?
- If I get serious about this, and decide to buy my own laptop, what
criteria should I look at?
-chris
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Thu Dec 20 2001 - 01:19:45 EET