Precord0.9.5 audio recorder

Audio editors, music players, video players, burning software, etc.
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mcewanw
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Pcreole 7.0.1 uploaded

#121 Post by mcewanw »

Uploaded 6.1.3 and 7.0.1

Download from first post of this thread.

I prefer directory structure of 7.0.1, but it needs testing so if you don't have time to do that, use what works. Test reports on 7.0.0 welcomed. I'm planning to port 7.0.1 to multi-user systems, and I prefer the new directory structure for that. Note that I'm planning to modify the 7.0.x series to use gettext for all text strings (towards internationalisation), but I wanted to get the main code working first with the new directory structure in the hope some users would test it.

Developed on Wary 5.0, but probably works in many other puppies too.

No new functionality added to either version, but pressing OK button on Help window should now correctly close it. Otherwise 6.1.3 is almost identical to 6.1.2.
Consider 7.0.0 a beta [and now 7.0.1]. The only major difference between it and 6.1.3 is that I've changed the directory structure/config_file_location to be more similar to that of Pcreole. For example, precord in /usr/bin rather than /usr/local/bin. More details below.

# Changes:
Version 7.0.1 (needs testing): Fixed the desktop app file so that it points to /usr/bin rather than the old /usr/local/bin location. The JWM Menu -> Multimedia entry should work now.

Version 7.0.0 (needs testing):
Re-organised to more closely follow structure of Pcreole.
In particular, precord script in /usr/bin not /usr/local/bin.
Default install config data stored in /etc/.precord/.
/usr/share/precord is no longer used.
Specified /bin/bash rather than /bin/sh and removed errant
"break" in case statement.
Bugfix: Help window should now close on pressing its OK button.
Main runtime configfile now stored as $HOME/.precord/.precordrc
You should now put any user-created slave plugins you want to use
in $HOME/.precord/

Version 6.1.3
Same structure and no major change to 6.1.2 except:
Version 6.1.3: Help window now closes on pressing OK button.
Removed an errant "break" in case. Changed /bin/sh to /bin/bash.
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nooby
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#122 Post by nooby »

Much appreciated. Love this prog and use it every day but have no clue on how to set it up properly.

More by accident I found this text. Not your fault I am a poor reader of text.
3. You should turn up the amplitude setting of the device being used for 'Capture', but be careful you don't unwittingly turn up the Playback Mic volume rather than the capture one, or you may end up recording sound fed back to your mic from your blaring speakers! Pressing the Tab key such that you come to the alsamixer Capture window, before setting capture devices, may help you to avoid unnecessarily increasing the playback amplitude controls rather than the record ones.

4. As an alternative to recording from the microphone, you could select some other device to capture from (e.g. Line in). If you select 'Mix' (or perhaps 'Mono Mix', 'PCM' or 'Master'; depending on what your sound card provides) as the capture device you can record most anything passing through your sound card (for example: streaming radio as in 01micko's pupRadio program).

5. You'll be able to see from the running VU display window if, and when, you have your sound controls correctly set up (but turn off the VU display before actually recording or you'll end up with a blank recording!).
Yes but have no idea what one do with it. I will try to make a screen capture to show where I get lost.
How do I make the screen cap seen in the forum?

If you take time and look at my pic. I have no idea if ogg_q is better than ogg_mm

And the 10 there seems to be default? Is that better or worse than 0?

128KB most likely is better than 64KB. But how does one know about the ogg_q. and ogg _mm thing

Yes I have looked in google and wikipedia and don't get a word of what them write there.

What about the Capture thing and Digital. To get close to 100 on the VU I have to add the Digital at the most right on Alsa. Have I forgot to do something.

What I want to do is to Capture what I hear when I listen to through the soundcard. So want to take it from the internal mixer but see not column for Mix or how to look into Mix? Where is that?

So many unknown things and I have no clue. Help would be appreciated.
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mcewanw
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#123 Post by mcewanw »

nooby wrote:Much appreciated. Love this prog and use it every day but have no clue on how to set it up properly.

More by accident I found this text. Not your fault I am a poor reader of text.
3. You should turn up the amplitude setting of the device being used for 'Capture', but be careful you don't unwittingly turn up the Playback Mic volume rather than the capture one, or you may end up recording sound fed back to your mic from your blaring speakers! Pressing the Tab key such that you come to the alsamixer Capture window, before setting capture devices, may help you to avoid unnecessarily increasing the playback amplitude controls rather than the record ones.

4. As an alternative to recording from the microphone, you could select some other device to capture from (e.g. Line in). If you select 'Mix' (or perhaps 'Mono Mix', 'PCM' or 'Master'; depending on what your sound card provides) as the capture device you can record most anything passing through your sound card (for example: streaming radio as in 01micko's pupRadio program).

5. You'll be able to see from the running VU display window if, and when, you have your sound controls correctly set up (but turn off the VU display before actually recording or you'll end up with a blank recording!).
Yes but have no idea what one do with it. I will try to make a screen capture to show where I get lost.
How do I make the screen cap seen in the forum?

If you take time and look at my pic. I have no idea if ogg_q is better than ogg_mm

And the 10 there seems to be default? Is that better or worse than 0?

128KB most likely is better than 64KB. But how does one know about the ogg_q. and ogg _mm thing

Yes I have looked in google and wikipedia and don't get a word of what them write there.

What about the Capture thing and Digital. To get close to 100 on the VU I have to add the Digital at the most right on Alsa. Have I forgot to do something.

What I want to do is to Capture what I hear when I listen to through the soundcard. So want to take it from the internal mixer but see not column for Mix or how to look into Mix? Where is that?

So many unknown things and I have no clue. Help would be appreciated.
Unfortunately, different sound cards appear to offer different facilities with alsa. My help text is the best I could offer based on the sound card on my own system. There is no "Digital" capture setting with that, so I'm afraid I don't know anything about that.

As for ogg, I actually don't know a great deal about the different ogg modes either (I knew more at the time I wrote Precord but that was long ago...). As far as I recall however, ogg_q is the Variable Bit Rate mode available with vorbis/ogg, so the encoder automatically tries to use higher bit rates for more complicated parts of the audio track. I "think" that ogg_mm is a fixed (constant) bit rate for all parts of the recording you are making, which for the same overall recording quality generally means bigger files. Perhaps some audiophile can enlighten both of us (and correct me should I be wrong with what I say here...)

In general, I believe most people use ogg_q and choose the quality number to give a suitable file size (for example, try recording a ten second voice clip at different quality values, compare the sound quality and the file size that results).

On my system at least, I find that I get much better recording quality if I select mono rather than stereo.
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Flash
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#124 Post by Flash »

I've never used Ogg, but I've converted many audio books on CD to mp3 so I can listen to them on my mp3 player at work. I experimented with quality settings and found that, at least for audio books, I can't hear any difference between 32 kbps mono mp3 and the original wav file on the CD. Mp3 files at 32 kbps mono take up about a 44th of their original size on the CD.

nooby
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#125 Post by nooby »

Thanks to both of you. Yes for listening to voice reading a book one can accept lower quality but if one hear high quality music over the radio and have that radio hooked up to the computer for recording then one want a quality on the recording that match what was sent out at least.

Yes I should read up on ogg then.

Yes it helped to know that the ogg_q change according to the content and thus give less big files and that ogg_mm has a fixed rate and thus a bigger file. Wish I had a place to read up on what it means practically.

Another thing in another thread one guy told us about a delay he noticed.

I have some 5 or 6 MiniDisc Recorders. only one or two still works. All the others have malfunction most likely due to fail to focus of the lens or too much dust on that lens.

Anyway most of these audio recorders have the opposite of a delay.

They record before one hit the start record now. So one can listen to the 6 seconds of start of the music and decide if it was what one expected and then hit start and it records six seconds prior to the hit start. That way one often manage to get the start recorded instead of missing the start.


That would be possible to implement on Precord and other such software too. Them already have it all in the memory and only have to include what is already there and do the opposite of a delay.
Would be very handy to have.
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darkcity
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#126 Post by darkcity »

Hi mcewanw

Thanks for your program.

There has been some confusion regarding selecting directories in precord.

for example setting DIRFILE1 via the 'directory icon' only allows a file to be selected, however you may not have created a file yet. This is easily worked around by typing directory and filename in the text box.

---

However there appears to be no way to selecting the date-stamped directory.

Typing it in the text box is ignored, as is changing the variable in /etc/.precordrc

DIRFILE1=$HOME/out.mp3
DIRFILE2=$HOME/out.mp3
DIRFILE_DS1=/mnt/home/
DIRFILE_DS2=$HOME/out.mp3

i tried looking at the code

line 508-
<input>echo $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S).mp3</input>


inserting directory leads to double date-stamping
<input>echo "$DIRFILE_DS1"$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S).mp3</input>

just using the directory gives
'cannot init file - /mnt/home/'

any help appreciated :twisted:

mcewanw
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#127 Post by mcewanw »

Sorry, had a new baby born in January so haven't been very active on Puppy much since then. I'm currently working on a few new apps (just published Premote) and two others in similar vein finished and soon to be published. After that, I'll take a look at the Precord issues you bring up, but with the baby consuming so much time, might not be till Christmas!
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Precord 7.0.2 released

#128 Post by mcewanw »

Precord mp3, wav and ogg recorder and player with pause controls and auto config saving

# Changes:
Version 7.0.2:
Fixed problem with record process intermittently not dying (and Precord was hardly working at all in Slacko or Lupu).
Uses Retrovol mixer if available (else alsamixer)
Now works in Slacko-5.3.3 and Lupu-5.28 as well as Wary 5.3

I discovered that the previous versions of Precord only worked flakily sometimes in Wary 5.3 and almost never in Slacko-5.3.3 and Lupu-5.28... Anyway, I've been working on that, and this new version seems to work fine with mp3 or wav recording in all three of the above distributions now.

I am a planning a version 8 by the end of the year with some improvements hopefully to the file and directory choosing mechanisms. But for now at least hopefully it should be working again!
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OscarTalks
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#129 Post by OscarTalks »

Hello mcewanw,

Many thanks for your work with Precord. I do find it to be a useful tool. As you say, with version 7.0.1 on Slacko 5.3.3 it would sometimes only record half a second or so and then stop and it would take a couple of attempts to get it to work properly. Also I noticed that when I am recording and press the "Stop" button it takes a second or two to actually respond so it is not easy to get a tight edit.

Anyway, downloading 7.0.2 now and will be testing it over the next few days and look forward to the forthcoming version 8. Thanks again.
Oscar in England
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mcewanw
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#130 Post by mcewanw »

OscarTalks wrote:Also I noticed that when I am recording and press the "Stop" button it takes a second or two to actually respond so it is not easy to get a tight edit.
Thanks OscarTalks.

I accept that tight recording can by tricky. Different codecs require different amounts of time after the recording is complete to process the output, If the record stop button was obeyed immediately, the result would thus be the loss of a few seconds from the end of what was attempted to be recorded. So, as a compromise, the Precord mechanism is designed on the basis that it is better to have a slightly longer recording on occasion than to lose any of what was intended. Some formats take less time than others though (wav for example), and it is pretty hard to predict how much extra time the codec needs. Precord thus allows a couple of seconds after stop is pressed for the codec to do its processing before terminating it. Should be close to optimal for mp3 recording, but probably not so tight for wav.
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Precord 7.0.3 released

#131 Post by mcewanw »

Tested in Slacko-5.3.3, Lupu 5.28-005 and Wary 5.3

7.0.3 is probably the last in the 7.x.x series. I'm planning to release ver 8.0.0 with significant improvements in the next day or so. I've included one ver 8.0.0 change in this one - pause control no longer a toggle. As it stands, precord should work with both the old gtkdialog3 and the development gtkdialog.

# Changes:
Version 7.0.2:
Fixed problem with record process intermittently not dying.
Uses Retrovol mixer if available (else alsamixer)
Now works in Slacko-5.3.3 and Lupu-5.28 as well as Wary 5.3
Version 7.0.3: pause button control no longer a toggle action on one button. Pause button causes pause; record starts recording again (same for play buttons).
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Precord version 8.0.0 released. A major upgrade.

#132 Post by mcewanw »

Precord mp3, wav and ogg recorder and player with pause controls and auto config saving

It is advised to remove all traces of previous precord versions before installing this, though it probably doesn't matter.

Version 8.0.0 now released!

Tested in Slacko-5.3.3, Lupu 5.28-005 and Wary 5.3
# Changes:
Version 8.0.0:
Major changes in the code underneath.
Much improved directory selection handling and more convenient pause control use. Tool-tips added to all major GUI elements.
This version is a major upgrade in precord functionality.

Still to do: Internationalisation... Sorry, that will be a while in coming, but it is planned.

Being a major upgrade, I would appreciate if as many people could test this as possible and report back here. Looking for reports not only on bugs, but also functionality, latency/delay effects and so on. In reporting, it is always good to know as much as possible about your system: Puppy version, CPU type and speed, RAM and so on. Especially important when considering any reported latency/delay issues in making recordings. Thanks in advance.
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#133 Post by OscarTalks »

Initial test of Precord version 8.0.0 looks all good so far.
My main recording computer is a Dell Vostro, Pentium Dual-Core CPU 3.2 GHz and 3 Gigs of RAM. Slacko 5.3.3 and 2 soundcards (mobo and PCI). Mostly I make short recordings of a few seconds to a minute or so, usually mp3 cbr at 256 kb/s. Mixer button opens Retrovol as stated. Stop button response now seems much more timely. I have some other lower-spec computers running other Puppies (Wary 5.3, Lucid 528-005 and Saluki) so will try to test those later and will report any issues that crop up. Good work.
Oscar in England
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#134 Post by mcewanw »

Thanks greatly OscarTalk. Testing is an essential part of development. When anything doesn't work it is good when someone reports it, otherwise it might not be noticed and fixed. Of course, I don't guarantee to ever make alterations people suggest, but I always consider what is said, and moreso when lots say it!
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Precord version 8.0.1 released

#135 Post by mcewanw »

It is advised to remove all traces of previous precord versions before installing this, though it probably doesn't matter.

Version 8.0.1 released.
# Changes:
Date-stamped file extension (mp3, wav, ogg) now automaticallly changed per relevant selection.

Version 8.0.0:
Major changes in the code underneath.
Much improved directory selection handling and more convenient pause control use. Tool-tips added to all major GUI elements.
This version is a major upgrade in precord functionality.

Still to do: Internationalisation... Sorry, that will be a while in coming, but it is planned.
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Precord 8.0.2 released. Now internationalised.

#136 Post by mcewanw »

It is advised to remove all traces of previous precord versions before installing this, though it probably doesn't matter.

Version 8.0.2 released. Dotpet in first post of this thread.
# Changes: Now Internationalised.
Please test, and upload translations to this thread.

Note: I don't want to change the interface size if possible. So if necessary, please abbreviate your translations to fit.

EDIT: Sorry, just discovered an introduced bug. I'll re-upload once I sort that out.
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Precord 8.0.2 released. Internationalised. Fixed/re-uploaded

#137 Post by mcewanw »

'Fixed' and re-uploaded

Version 8.0.2 released. Download from first post in this thread.

It is advised to remove all traces of previous precord versions before installing new ones, though it probably doesn't matter.

# Changes: Now Internationalised.

Please test, and upload translations to this thread.

Been lots of changes underneath so reports of it working/malfunctioning would be appreciated.
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#138 Post by plankenstein »

Just used the lucid version last night to record some youtube audio. Worked like a champ! Thank you so very much.
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Precord 8.0.3 released. Internationalised

#139 Post by mcewanw »

Version 8.0.3 released. Download from first post in this thread.

It is advised to remove all traces of previous precord versions before installing new ones, though it probably doesn't matter.

# Changes: Just a small change from 8.0.2: I shortened the play stop button response time.

Now Internationalised.

Please test, and upload translations to this thread.

Been lots of changes underneath recently so reports of it working/malfunctioning would be appreciated.
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Pelo

ça ne marche pas avec Slacko 5.3.3

#140 Post by Pelo »

Although capture set in alsamixer, precord records nothing at all, but this tool works well in lucid and racy.
I think the problem is not Precord, but Slacko.

Obviously, XVIDCAP does not record too. I was trying precord to test.
I test Precord 8.0.3 with Lucid 5.2.8 and I come back to inform you.
Precord runs on Slacko 5.3.3 XFCE : 2014 with specific version for Slacko

Have a nice week-end
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