audacity was recently updated such that it now works with pulse audio.
After seeing someone’s video tutorial on pavucontrol and audacity on youtube, I tried out audacity for the first time in years. Its much easier to work with than it was a few years back. What is now neat is with pulse audio, in addition to using audacity to record from one’s mic, one can use audacity to record ANY audio that is streaming into one’s PC from the web.
Reference arecord, dependant on one’s PC setup, on my PC it does not always work well with pulse audio (one may simply get a 'device/resource busy when trying to record with arecord when pavucontrol is running) so some caution may be needed there so user’s are not frustrated if it does not appear in the pulse audio recording tab. I like arecord for basic recording, but when using something more advanced, I like to record with another application (currently I am playing with audacity).
But wrt arecord, when I use it, this is a typical command that I use:
arecord -vv -f S16_LE -c 2 -D hw:1,0 new.wav
where with ‘-f’ I specifiy the format ‘S16_LE’ and with ’ -c ’ I specify 2 channels. Some users may need ’ 1 ’ for 1-channel. The output file in this case is ‘new.wav’ and to stop the recording I press . One should pay CLOSE attention to arecord’s output errors as they are VERY informative. I also specify which microphone device to use, where in the above example I specified ’ -D ’ (for the device) ’ hw:1,0 ’ which is my webcam mic. I can get a list of devices by typing:
arecord -l
where that is a LOWER-CASE-L … and on my PC one can see:
oldcpu@corei7:~> arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
**card 0**: Intel [HDA Intel], **device 0**: AD198x Analog [AD198x Analog]
Subdevices: 3/3
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
**card 1**: U0x46d0x821 [USB Device 0x46d:0x821], **device 0**: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
with the convention hw:card,device, and in the example where ‘hw:0,0’ is my mother board (AD198x Analog) input mic jack, and hw:1,0 is my USB webcam mic. The various subdevices one can see under the motherboard device are the various front and rear jacks and line input, whose selection can be controlled in one’s mixer.
