Scheduled audio recording software

[Brian McKee]

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Randy McElligott wrote:
>     > for example, I have it set up to record a show on Sunday's at 2pm,
>     > another schedule to record a show on Tuesdays at 5pm every week etc...
>     >
>     > Is there such software for Ubuntu? This is the only application
>     that is
>     > holding me back from using Ubuntu on a regular basis.

Well, it's not as pretty a solution as I thought I'd find, but this will
work just fine...
The basic background is here -
<http://jordilin.wordpress.com/2006/07/28/howto-recording-audio-from-the-command-line>

Step one - Assuming you want mp3 output - install 'lame' either by
searching for it in Synaptic, or opening a terminal and typing 'sudo
aptitude install lame'

Step two - make sure your recording source is set to the right device.
I believe System -> Preferences -> Sound - the Devices tab Sound Capture
should be set to Alsa
Alternatively, open a terminal and type 'alsamixer'.  It's not exactly
pretty, but it's functional.  Hit the 'tab' key to switch from Playback
to Capture (you'll see that mentioned on the top left)  then use the
arrow keys left and right to highlight your line input column and hit
the space bar to make the L R CAPTUR entry show up in that column.
Lastly, hit the Escape key to exit the program.  (yes, it's clunky)

Steps one and two only have to be done once.

Tune your radio, make sure it's playing, then open a terminal and we'll
make a test recording.
Type
  arecord -f cd -d 10 -t raw | lame -r - out.mp3
What that is going to do is record 10 seconds (the number after the -d)
of cd quality audio and pipe it into lame, which re-encodes it to mp3
and saves it as out.mp3

You should end up with a file called out.mp3 in your home folder that
sounds like 10 seconds of your radio.

Once you have that working, scheduling is easy!

The 'at' command is an old unix standby.  Just tell it when you want
your recording to start.  e.g. type

   at 7pm Monday
and hit return
You'll get a > prompt indicating it's waiting to find out what to do at
7 on monday.
Type your
 arecord -f cd -d NumberOfSecondsToRecordFor -t raw | lame -r -   out.mp3
and hit return again.
Then hit Control-D  -  it will exit and give you a one line confirmation
of when the job will run.

If you want to see what you've got scheduled already, type atq (at,queue
- - get it?)
If you want to delete a scheduled job use atrm.

Note of course your computer has to be on for the recording to run.  I
don't think you need to be logged in though (untested)

Let me know how you make out, I'm sure it seems like a lot all at once.

Brian
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