Recording audio with Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks

Inspired by some recent posts from oldcpu I decided to grab some audio from my Logitech webcam, just for the fun of it. openSUSE 11.3 i586 is in use.

> lsusb
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 046d:0991 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Pro for Notebooks

> arecord -l
**** Liste der Hardware-Geräte (CAPTURE) ****
Karte 0: Intel [HDA Intel], Gerät 0: ALC892 Analog [ALC892 Analog]
  Sub-Geräte: 1/1
  Sub-Gerät #0: subdevice #0
Karte 1: U0x46d0x991 [USB Device 0x46d:0x991], Gerät 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Sub-Geräte: 1/1
  Sub-Gerät #0: subdevice #0

KMix showed a tab for “USB Device 0x46d:0x991”. I did set the recording level to max to start with.

Everything looked promising, so I went ahead, and after some trial and error (including a visit to the arecord man page) this was the command line for the recording:

arecord -D hw:1,0 -vv -f S16_LE -r 16000 test.wav

Playback just needs:

aplay test.wav

It works! Though I have to say that the audio quality is mediocre (to say the best). I blame it on the quality of the built-in microphone of this camera. It sounds like it was recorded in a giant bathroom.

Well done in getting it working. Sometimes it is necessary to slightly back off on the capture levels to improve the audio quality.