Recording 'What u hear'

Jebususu · 2011-03-25 13:30:19

I'm looking to record some videogame fragclips, using glc (like FRAPS, but for linux). But I'm having problems getting it to record the game sounds, I can record mic input fine, But I don't see an option in the record section of alsamixer that allows 'what u hear' or similair. The only capture options I have to choose from are front mic, rear mic, CD and line. Any help would be much appreciated, thanks

ngoonee · 2011-03-25 20:55:06

A sound server (pulseaudio/jack) would make this quite trivial. With alsa you probably have to modify .asoundrc in some manner (in other words, not as trivial).

thisoldman · 2011-03-25 23:08:47

There's arecord, included in the alsa-utils package. It's a bit of heavy work going through all the possible configurations and get recording to work.

The instructions given in the Audacity wiki worked for me when I tried them about 6 months ago: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? … e_computer.

Last edited by thisoldman (2011-03-25 23:09:18)

schivmeister · 2011-03-26 07:43:25

https://github.com/nullkey/glc/wiki/Capture

Audio is captured by default. Otherwise, use the proper option to select the playback or digital device. I can see that you can extract the audio from the final output/render, but some are having problems with that. You may have to seek help upstream (glc). I doubt it has anything to do with alsa itself or your sound setup, since the app just intercepts the alsa playback device, or the "digital channel".

Last edited by schivmeister (2011-03-26 07:44:54)

Wintershade · 2011-04-07 10:54:11

I have a similar problem with this. My problem is that I have an Intel HDA audio card which by default doesn't have the option to capture "Mix", "Mix Mono", "What U Hear" or any similar input (tried in both alsamixer under Linux and the sound mixer under Windows, neither have it).
Thanks to schivmeister here I was able to start the JACK daemon, but I'm not sure how to configure it in order to be able to capture, for example, the Mic channel and PCM channel from my soundcard.

Where can I find more about configuring JACK? I suspect it has someting to do with connections, e.g. in the qjackctl. My connections window in the qjackctl looks like this:

Any ideas which channels I should connect? And is there a way to save the connections template/preset once I do it?
Also, any reading/video materials concerning this? TIA

[ewaller] Moderator Note: Watch the rules for posting pictures. This picture exceeds the 250 pixel limit, but slides in under the 50 KB limit, so I'll let it slide.
@ewaller, thanks, will pay closer attention to it in the future.

Last edited by Wintershade (2011-04-14 10:18:51)

schivmeister · 2011-04-07 11:47:26

JACK is a sound server meant for a different purpose altogether. For eg., there is no such thing as a "digital channel" or "digital mix". Everything has an input and an output, like analogue audio hardware counterparts. Your computer has an input (mic OR line-in) and output (speakers), and that's how JACK and its QjackCtl front-end displays yours. In this case, you connect things on the left to the ones on the right.

Any program that has JACK output capability and has been configured to do it will appear on the left. For those without JACK capability, you can use the ALSA plug-in [1].

There's a whole load of information on the web. For starters, these are suggested by Google:

http://wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku.php … s#qjackctl
http://www.linkedlistcorruption.com/audio-kbase/?p=85

As for "recording what you hear":

http://carthick.wordpress.com/2007/11/2 … g-arecord/
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-List … 02015.html

[1] http://alsa.opensrc.org/Jack_(plugin) (package: alsa-plugins)

Wintershade · 2011-04-14 08:08:03

@schivmeister,
Thank you for the information. I'm still looking into it as much as my free time allows me, and it seems I'm making some slow progress. You've been really helpful
Currently I'm having a little trouble getting sound in WINE (like OP Jebususu, I would - among other things - like to record some video game clips), but I haven't tried everything yet.

Also, it would be nice if I could run jackd at my KDE startup and have Phonon+GStreamer put it to good use, but I guess if I wanted help with that I'd have to open yet another thread

Thanks again!

Wintershade · 2011-04-14 22:59:05

(bump) Okay, after a few hours of digging a little deeper into this, I have made the following progress.

First of all, I got JACK working fine, and doing almost everything I need. However, this "almost" part turned out to be crucial for me, since it involves the centuries-old grudge between JACK and WINE. So I gave up on JACK in favour of PulseAudio, as @schivmeister mentioned in one of the links.

With PulseAudio I've had just a little bit more luck, in terms of getting closer to what I want in a little less time. I have managed to set up the PulseAudio monitor in the .asoundrc, and use it as a recording source. However, with this setup I cannot record the input from my microphone.
In other words, I can now either record my microphone output, or I can record everything else what I hear in my system (which is very cool, because without PulseAudio or JACK I couldn't do even that).

So now comes the question again, is it possible to record both the PulseAudio monitor and the microphone (or any other capture channel) input at the same time? If yes, how? If not, why?
I suspect it would involve making another pcm (or ctl? or both?) channel in the .asoundrc, but what should this contain?

My current .asoundrc looks like this:

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

pcm.pulse_monitor {
  type pulse
  device alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-surround-40.monitor
}

ctl.pulse_monitor {
  type pulse
  device alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-surround-40.monitor
}

pcm.pulse_mic {
  type pulse
  device alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo
}

ctl.pulse_mic {
  type pulse
  device alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo
}

Any further ideas? Thanks in advance!

Update: I solved it, with some help from here, some from LinuxQuestions, and some from this article (actually the comments).
I now have fully operational sound recording from all the sources I want (PA monitor and the microphone).

This is what I did...

1. open /etc/pulse/default.pa, and uncomment the line:

load-module module-null-sink

2. ...actually I have to give the sink a name, so I changed the line into:

load-module module-null-sink sink_name=rmd

(rmd stands for RecordMyDesktop)

3. added two more loopback sinks for rmd

load-module module-loopback latency_msec=5 sink=rmd
load-module module-loopback latency_msec=5 sink=rmd

4. edited my .asoundrc to remove the unneeded stuff (which was already covered by the alsa-plugins package anyway):

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

5. Restarted my system, mostly to give myself a little time to chant "IA! IA! CTHULHU FHTAGN!" a few times, just for the good measure...

6. Fired up qt-recordmydesktop, started recording, fired up pavucontrol, started recording with qt-recordmydesktop

7. In pavucontrol's Recording tab, set the application [recordmydesktop] to capture "Monitor of Null Output", and the two Loopbacks to Null Outptut set one from "Monitor of Internal Audio", and the other one just "Internal Audio".

Voila! It works perfectly now
I'm absolutely thrilled to have achieved this, because it's not really something my soundcard was even meant to be able to do, and I'm absolutely positive that it's impossible to achieve under W*****s. Many thanks to everyone for your help, it is much appreciated.

Last edited by Wintershade (2011-04-30 08:21:29)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-03-25 13:30:19

Recording 'What u hear'

#2 2011-03-25 20:55:06

Re: Recording 'What u hear'

#3 2011-03-25 23:08:47

Re: Recording 'What u hear'

#4 2011-03-26 07:43:25

Re: Recording 'What u hear'

#5 2011-04-07 10:54:11

Re: Recording 'What u hear'

#6 2011-04-07 11:47:26

Re: Recording 'What u hear'

#7 2011-04-14 08:08:03

Re: Recording 'What u hear'

#8 2011-04-14 22:59:05

Re: Recording 'What u hear'

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