Help for krecord
krecord is a easy-to-use sound recorder for KDE, it can record to (and
playback from) memory and *.wav files. Should'nt be a problem to
record huge files. Well, unless you run out of memory...
Recording and playback is basically finished, fine-tuned and debugged for
Linux/i386 systems now. There are some i18n and portability issues.
Other OSS/little-endian boxes should work fine too (but this is untested),
OSS/big-endian should work with 8-bit sound.
I dropped my plans to add more functions and entered the
BugfixingAndMaintaining Mode. For editing check out the other
programs, there is kwav for example.
Description
mostly TODO, currently only the most important stuff is listed.
The main part of the window is just a list of the buffers you have.
Empty after startup. krecord knows two sorts of buffers:
- memory buffers
- these are kept in memory, if you want to keep the data there, you
have to save the buffer to a file.
These are listed as "buffer #nr".
- file buffers
- these are attached to a file and krecord reads and writes directly
from/to the file. These are listed with the filename.
File buffers are useful if you want to record huge sound files (with size >
RAM). But they are more sensitive to background activity,
i.e. recording overruns are more likely.
recording/playback starts allways at the beginning of the
buffer, there is no position scale.
The status line holds (from left to right): status / sample rate /
channels / audio format / latency. status might be:
- idle
- playback
- recording
- I think these are clear...
- monitor
- reads data from the souncard and processes them. You can use the
freq spectrum window or input level window (or both :-) to see what
comes in. You can adjust the record level then. It is nice for
trouble-shooting too. If no data arrives, you probably have to set
the right recording source with a mixer program, kmix for example.
There is a menu entry in the options menu to start up kmix...
- waiting
- krecord waits for a signal higher than the record trigger level.
record trigger level is specified in percent. 5% gives good results
most of the time for me, but YMMV depending on quality and volume of
the input signal.
The freq spectrum displays the frequencies from 100Hz to 10kHz. The
x-axis has a logaritmic scale - 1kHz is in the middle. y-axis is
linear, the horizontal red line ist the maximum level.
There are a few handy keyboard shortcuts:
- up/down
- walk in the buffer list
- Return
- start playback
- 'R'
- start recording
- Escape
- stop record/playback
- 'N', Space
- starts a new file buffer (named song<nr>.wav). This
is useful for recording your old LP's (if you want to burn them to
CD's): Just start krecord, your LP, and press 'N' every time you want
to start a new track. Burn with "cdrecord -audio
song*.wav".
Known Problems
- I have trouble with recording overruns sometimes :-(
- The freq spectrum/input level is'nt in sync for playback - it
does'nt take in account the delay due to the sound driver buffering.
- Supports OSS only. Yes, there already is a sunaudio.cpp file, but
this is currently a dummy only...
support for big-endian machines needs some work too.
TODO List
Credits
- Florian Kolbe <Florian.Kolbe@in-gmbh.de> (input level window)
- Stéphane Gourichon <gouricho@poleia.lip6.fr> (input level patches)
- Thomas Strehl <tstrehl@suse.de> (KDE2 port)
Gerd Knorr
<kraxel@goldbach.in-berlin.de>