bug or features I don't understand?

Tom Horsley tom.horsley at att.net
Thu Jul 5 11:31:31 UTC 2007


I was trying to test my motherboard's microphone input
yesterday and only found the utterly unintelligible
krec app that could (supposedly) record sound. Never
was able to figure out what combination of sticks
I needed to poke it with, so I installed audacity-nonfree
from livna.

Audacity has the preferred recording device set by
default to "OSS: /dev/dsp", which actually could
record sound, but when I played it back, iitt wwaass
rreeaallyy ssllooww :-). Acts like it was gathering
samples at one rate, but audacity thought it was
some completely different rate.

There are three other devices listed in the preferences
with names like "ALSA: gibberish", and trying them
eventually led me to one that seemed to work
correctly.

So, is this a bug in the OSS emulation under ALSA? Or
just some feature of the insanely complex audio
system I don't understand (there is, after all, only
the one sound chip on the motherboard, so how that
became 4 devices in audacity, I don't know).

When krec was initially driving me crazy, I tried booting
XP on this machine, and the sound recorder app "just worked"
when I said record from microphone, so at least I knew
it was possible for the microphone to work :-).




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