No PCM capture in alsamixer / audacity

WyoPBS · 2010-03-16 00:33:11

I got a blazing fast new barebones kit a few weeks ago and installed all-new Arch onto it, and gradually everything is starting to look familiar and works great.

EXCEPT... there is no way in alsamixer or audacity to select dmix or PCM or plain old "mixer" as the input source, so I can directly capture streaming audio.

What I tried: Created ~/.asoundrc with a section pcm.copy, ran alsaconf to rescan my audio devices, tried aumixer, tried an unbelievably complicated jackd setup, installed alsa-oss and changed audacity to use oss instead of alsa as the device driver... nothing worked. most of the above methods did not produce any recorded audio at all, and changing audacity to listen on oss gave me error messages that the device was not found.

As a workaround, I can use ffmpeg to rip the audio stream from the Flash video files cached in /tmp, but that's a real pain and it won't help if I'm, say, making a video tutorial and need to capture the PC output along with the screen capture.

Since hardware, kernels, and apps are all new I don't know what changed. The audio card is the onboard one that came with the motherboard; it shows up as "HDA ATI SB" with the RealTek ALC889A chipset.

Anyone else have that kind of audio device and can you make get PCM capture to work? Anything else I can try to make this seamless? Obviously the last resort would be to run a cable directly from speaker output to line in, but that's even more of a pain...

jdarnold · 2010-03-23 18:38:10

Can't help you with your problem, all I can do is to chime in to say I'm in the same boat. I've also tried 'arecorder' to see if I can grab the ALSA output, all to no avail. I have an ALC888 chip. I'm running openbox with ALSA, trying to capture the analog output. Any ideas out there?

Arch Linux

#1 2010-03-16 00:33:11

No PCM capture in alsamixer / audacity

#2 2010-03-23 18:38:10

Re: No PCM capture in alsamixer / audacity

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