Do we need a sound recorder in the default install?

[David Henningsson]

On 01/14/2013 01:24 PM, Iain Lane wrote:
> Hey,
>
> In the course of working towards porting our default desktop to using
> GStreamer 1.0, one of the last holdouts is the venerable gnome-media
> package, also known as "Sound Recorder".
>
> I discovered from reading around on the web that the maintainer thinks
> it's a dead project.
>
>    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679381
>
> and (linked from this bug) that there is a more GNOME3-ish rewrite in
> progress (which unfortunately doesn't use gstreamer-1.0 yet, but as it
> doesn't do as many things as gnome-media [and uses Vala], porting should
> be easier. Bindings do exist now).
>
>    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.multimedia/1893
>
> I think we should remove gnome-media from the default install. In
> addition to not being ported and being EOLed upstrem, it seems to be
> quite crashy now. There are some bad reviews on the software centre too;
> I don't think it's providing a good experience to our users
> notwithstanding the lack of a finished/working gst-1.0 port.
>
> If we do do this, should we replace it with another microphone recording
> application? Is this a usecase that we think is important for the
> default install? gnome-sound-recorder (the rewrite) would require some
> engineering commitment to port to 1.0 and resolve bugs (for example it
> segfaults here as soon as I click 'record' ;-)). Unless someone knows of
> another suitable lightweight recording app.

FWIW, I don't think we need a lightweight recording app on the default 
install. It's just not a common enough use case.
As for dropping it completely, I'm less sure - it'd still be nice to be 
able to do:

Bug reporter: "hey, when I record from my mic, it sounds like a rubber 
ball in a dishwasher"
Triager: "Ok, please record a sample and attach to the bug. Just install..."

At that point, it would be good to have something with a GUI, and that 
goes through gstreamer, or at least PulseAudio, when it records. The two 
that comes to my mind are audacity (not lightweight) and qarecord 
(unmaintained). Both are, IIRC, connecting either directly to alsa, or 
using the alsa-plugin layer to connect to PulseAudio.

-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
https://launchpad.net/~diwic