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We have an experiment wherein we need to record audio for a couple of days. Audacity seems to freeze after a few hours. Any other alternative?

Manoj Kumar
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3 Answers3

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You should use ROTTER for that (it is on the repos).
It will record forever and you could ask it to delete the olders.
It is configurable by parameters on the command line.

zx485
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Rubenalf
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A graphical frontend may survive for days on a stable machine but there are many reasons why it may stop working. To avoid such side effects let me suggest to use a more low level utility for recording.

If there was no need of audio compression we can record using the simple command line tool parec that comes with pulseaudio. We can adjust sample rate or channels, record RAW PCM data or choose from a variety of output containers. Recording is done to a file if specified.

parec --device=<source> <filename>

This will record from the specified source device using default settings which can be adapted (see manpage pacat) until it was stopped by keyboard interrupt, TERM or KILL signal, or by closing of the terminal.

Unfortunately instabilities of Pulseaudio, ALSA, or even the hardware may still occur if we are talking about days. But these will then have adverse effects on all other sound recording tools too.

Takkat
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  • You might also pipe the output into an encoder such as oggenc or flac, but your cpu might not have enough horsepower to keep up with the compression in real time depending on the settings used. Without compression, the file size can grow extremely large. – psusi Oct 27 '15 at 23:00
  • Okay, so the general observation is that a command line interface is better than a graphical one? Also, any particular reason for parec? There are others too, like sox. – Manoj Kumar Oct 28 '15 at 00:21
  • Sure, there is sox, or avconv, ffmpeg, and the like... they have the advantage of compressing audio on recording, or record from ALSA without the need of PulseAudio which can be of advantage on limited storage space for the presumably large audio files. Adding any additional application, or a codec for compression may add to instabilities - that's why I mentioned parec which directly uses pulseaudio and not much more. In case we don't have pulseaudio running then ffmpeg, or sox may be good alternatives as they can record form ALSA directly. – Takkat Oct 28 '15 at 07:17
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Try Audio Recorder it's a small utility for recording audio, you can install it by typing :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:osmoma/audio-recorder
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audio-recorder

There is also Ardour it's a powerful digital audio workstation that gives you everything you need to record, edit, mix, and arrange professional audio, you can install it by typing :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dobey/audiotools
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ardour

Or download it from the download page.

Bilal
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