Independent ALSA and linux audio support site

Record from pcm

From the ALSA wiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Say you are playing a movie with mplayer, or some other application that's using alsa output, and you wish to record a sample of what you're hearing. The following should do the trick.

To record sound that is playing from another application use the 'Mix' device as the capture device:

amixer set 'Mix' cap

Some cards have a seperate 'Capture' device that needs to be activated for capture and set to a non-zero volume (It's value seems to be an input gain?).

amixer set 'Capture' cap

amixer set 'Capture' 10%

The percentage on the 'Capture' device should be raised or lowered to taste. You could also use alsamixer and your spacebar to select your capture device.

Now you should be able to record what's currently playing through your soundcard with:

arecord -t wav -f cd test.wav

The latest version of Audacity now has alsa support and can record from the Mix device.

Retrieved from "http://alsa.opensrc.org/Record_from_pcm"

Category: Howto