Radio recording with aplayarecord Sender: Linux

You need to keep track of the various options for recording and make them compatible between arecord and lame, and what is coming out of your soundcard.

Sometimes trial and error is the best approach. Try the different options, and see which one works.

For instance, this one records directly from my sblive card, pipes it to lame for conversion to mp3, then writes it to disk. Notice the - - notation. That means lame will acept on STDIN and write to STDOUT. That was the only way I could get it to work, and thus needed to feed the STDOUT to cat, to actually write the file.

arecord -f S16LE -c1 -r 44100 -t wav -d 3600 -D hw:0,0 lame -m m

The important thing is to see that I setup the options the same for arecord and lame, and to make things easier for lame, made the input wav, instead of dat (raw). You also need to specify a length of recording time to arecord. It's a PITA, but that is the way they have it setup (probably so you don't fill up your disk with a forgotten recording which you forget to stop).

Ogg is a bit easier (it is more advanced than lame) (watch line wrap, its all 1 line)

arecord -f cd -d 3600 -D hw:0,0 oggenc - -otmp-`date +%d%b%y%H%M%S`.ogg

If you still get silence, then your alsamixer settings are probably not set right. You need AC'97 capture turned up on my card, but YMMV. If in doubt, just turn everything up until you get sound.

Good luck, and don't think you are a dunce for not being able to figure it out. I spent a whole Saturday afternoon on it, before I got it right. :-)

-- I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.