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SBliveCapture

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20020711

How to capture the SBlives internally generated wavetable synth sounds to a wav, then an ogg, file while playing and listening to a MIDI file using hardware loaded soundfonts. Many thanks to Dr. Matthias Nagorni for the essential clues.

The first obvious step is to have ALSA correctly installed so you can fire up alsamixer to make sure these particular controls are set to;

  1 Master    90|90 unmute (m key)
  9 PCM       90|90
 19 Music     90|90 captur (space bar)
 20 Music Cap 90|90
    Capture    0|0 
(add more if found to be required)

A note about Capture: this is really IGain, and will seriously distort recording (MIDI at least).

Then simply use pmidi in one shell and arecord in another. Here is a small shell script I used to make this process easier. It takes a single argument of the MIDI file without the .mid extention and simplifies converting a MIDI file to an ogg for net transfer.

#!/bin/sh
set -e
#set -x
[ -z $1 ] && echo "Usage: record midifile (without .mid extention)" && exit 1
TEMP=/var/tmp
arecord -f cd $TEMP/$1.wav &
pmidi -p 65:0 $1.mid
killall arecord
oggenc -q 5 $TEMP/$1.wav -o $TEMP/$1.ogg
#rm $TEMP/$1.wav
ls -l $TEMP

I use the above as /usr/local/bin/record (remember to chmod +x) and be warned that TEMP can get quite large so make sure wherever you point it to has lots of room. While it may seem crude to just kill the arecord process it is remarkably accurate, a test run using 4 different soundfonts on the same MIDI file produced exactly the same sized 20 Mb wave files.

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

Category: Sound cards