(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Home: http://gna.org/projects/mhwaveedit
Version: 1.4.21

mhWaveEdit is a graphical program for editing, playing and recording sound files. It is lightweight, portable, user-friendly and handles large files very well.

Compiled in 4.31.

aragon

This works, and is fairly easy to use for something so powerful. I used it to record audio tapes and save them as mp3, although mhWaveEdit can save what it records in just about any audio format.

thanks aragon

Always bugged me that clicking on launch mixer in mhwavedit - didn't
Now it does
- hope this is used in Puppy 4.4

Flash wrote:This works, and is fairly easy to use for something so powerful. I used it to record audio tapes and save them as mp3

Puppy 4.3.1 has Mhwaveedit v.1.4.16 on the official iso, but I can't see any menu item for "record". How did you record from your soundcard to mp3?

mcewanw,

it's in the play menu, last point. F12 wont work as this is grabbed by jwm in puppy (main menu).

aragon

I found it thanks.

If you expand the mhWaveEdit GUI window to its full width, you should see a big red "record" button.

If all you want to do is record straight to mp3, there's Lobster's modification of this thing. I only just saw it. I haven't tried it so I don't know how well it works.

flash, followed your link and would say that mcewanw eventually knows about that thing

Even funnier is Lobster's "mod" to my simple program. His mod actually came from a post I made earlier to him (i.e. he modified my program with code I gave him from elsewhere earlier... sigh...):

thread concerning my earlier program: arecord2lamegui:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 011#141614

Aug 2007, mcewanw wrote to Lobster wrote: Here is the link:
http://jordilin.wordpress.com/2006/07/2 ... mand-line/
. . .
arecord -f cd -d numberofseconds -t raw | lame -x - out.mp3

I then gave Lobster some specific examples to which I got the reply:

Lobster, Aug 2007 wrote: this worked OK and is very convenient - many thanks :)

Code: Select all

arecord -f cd -t raw | lame -a -h -b 24 --nspsytune --resample 22 --lowpass 7 -x - out.mp3 

what goes round comes around ... sigh ... :-)

But if Lobster hadn't posted the mod, it wouldn't have become available to everyone.

Flash wrote:But if Lobster hadn't posted the mod, it wouldn't have become available to everyone. :(

Does anyone actually use my wreckedleg recorder? Had I known that and an appropriate piece of feedback been posted to the wreckedleg thread then I would no doubt have obliged and modified the single line of code required to make it work on Puppy 4 series. Of course, Lobster is free to add the mod himself, the program is GPL, but it is customary to ask the developer(s) if they will make changes or add features prior to modding programs. I provide most of the programs I develop for download from http://wiak.org/; if people modify my programs on murga forum without informing me then there is a danger of my 'official' downloads not having the mods - so "others" end up losing out.

Continued development relies on continuous feedback; that is the issue.

[instead, Lobster started a new thread and effectively "renamed" the program ("Dingo Record"), not that it matters to me; I just move on to do other things in such cases - I'm only revisiting audio recording now because I am planning an upgrade to Foksyfeyer accessibility suite for the visually impaired - or has Lobster already made a one line adjustment to that and renamed it in a new thread?]

i think you're both right,

yes to Flash because only released mods are visible to the public.

and yes to mcewanw that it might have been easier/better to inform the creator about the mods, so that he could change the source if he thinks that the mods are important/correct/nice/whatever.

aragon

Well I got a chance to try out precord. It is simple to use, works well and seems well-behaved (no unexpected behavior.) So I'd say that mcewanw got it right exept for the one mistake that Lobster "fixed" to make it work in Puppy 4

The resulting 44 kHz, 128 kbps mp3 file is probably stereo, which is wasteful if all I'm recording is just me talking into a microphone, and 128 kbps is much too high quality for recording my voice. . 22 kHz (mono,) 32 kbps would probably sound just as good, while producing files an eighth the size.

mcewanw wrote:...Does anyone actually use my wreckedleg recorder? ...

I'd like to try using it (well, precord) to record an audiotape as mp3, but at the lower resolution described above. It appears from the source code here that the settings are compiled in and can't be changed without recompiling. Is that correct?

Flash wrote:Well I got a chance to try out precord. It is simple to use, works well and seems well-behaved (no unexpected behavior.) So I'd say that mcewanw got it right exept for the one mistake that Lobster "fixed" to make it work in Puppy 4 :wink:

The resulting 44 kHz, 128 kbps mp3 file is probably stereo, which is wasteful if all I'm recording is just me talking into a microphone, and 128 kbps is much too high quality for recording my voice. :lol: . 22 kHz (mono,) 32 kbps would probably sound just as good, while producing files an eighth the size.

mcewanw wrote:...Does anyone actually use my wreckedleg recorder? ...

I'd like to try using it (well, precord) to record an audiotape as mp3, but at the lower resolution described above. It appears from the source code here that the settings are compiled in and can't be changed without recompiling. Is that correct?

I originally created two versions of wreckedleg: the original was a C program which called gtkdialog; the second was a bash program calling gtkdialog. I believe Lobster basically changed one line of code in the bash version (calling the result precord) because the underlying original recording program "sox" was not available in Puppy 4 series. Being thus in bash, precord is not compiled, so you can just change the line of code which calls up arecord and lame:

i.e. in a text editor, open precord, and look for the line:

<action>"arecord -f cd -t raw | lame -x - \$DIRFILE &"</action>

You need to change the parameters for arecord and lame to give the bitrate/quality you want. Trouble is, I don't know the exact parameters off the top of my head.

arecord --help
and
lame --help

and or the man pages for these.

need to be digested again! (it is two years since I really worked on this)

Actually, I'm currently working on a new audio recorder based on krecspk (something else I wrote), to also use arecord and lame and thus work in Puppy 4 series.

krecspk had a button which allowed you to increase or decrease the bitrate to what you wanted, so I'm planning to improve that facility. It also allowed choice of mono or stereo. I'm now also adding a pause button. The re-write is going a bit slow at the moment though, because I'm rusty on gtkdialog (it does all basically work, but I want to improve/change the interface). I'll post the program to the forum once it is finished though I'm not sure when that will be, because I'm in process of selling my house and busy with that.

Actually the following seems to do what you want. It produces 22.05kHz, 32 kbits/s mono:
The resulting file size is roughly 4 kbytes per second of recording.

mcewanw sorry if I have been up to no good / impolite / absconding code etc.

If it is any consolation I can not record in Puppy
whatever I do.

I even bought a sound card
though I have perfectly good inbuilt recording (in theory)
well no in practice - have used on Ubuntu
- could be a 64 bit compile . . . m m m . . . dunno

I did use 'wreckedleg' with great success
and look forward to any new resources

I think my sound recording problems are kernel based
- drivers are playing sound - not recording

Now about the code mods
If I mod something, I try and post to the relevant area
sometimes can not find the post and start a new thread.

Please forgive me
(I will be whipping myself all day with seaweed as an act of contrition)

Thanks mcewanw, that's exactly what I wanted. I'll try it this weekend and report how it works. Now can you add a VU meter so I can set the mic level?

Seriously, perhaps a VU meter program could run concurrently with Precord, if I could find one. Maybe one could be made using Pwidgets. I know a real-time VU meter is possible, because mhWaveEdit shows one in the record window. How hard would it be to extract the code for it and use it to make a stand-alone meter?

flash,

arecord should have one (but maybe this is only true for aplay), from manpage:

-V, --vumeter=TYPE
Specifies the VU-meter type, either stereo or mono.
The stereo VU-meter is available only for 2-channel stereo samples
with interleaved format.

aragon

works! It took me a while to realize it was working. What it does is constantly refresh the length of a text line in a rxvt window. If you leave the rxvt window at its default size, all you see is a bunch of meaningless noise. I stretched the rxvt window out horizontally and that's when I saw how it worked. Great, now I'll have to see if it will play nice with precord.

I tried changing line 39 of precord as mcewanw suggested, but it's not obvious how to do it. Copying and pasting between the "" on that line doesn't work. There's a double space after the second m in mcewanw's line of code. Is it supposed to be that way? I took one of the spaces out and changed a few other things, I can't remember what they were now, and then precord worked, but wouldn't shut off.

[brief thread hijack]

@ Lobster
So you can play sound but can't record ... did you set up Alsamixer?
Instructions here (in German, sorry):
www.angelfire.com/linux/tux25/linux/linux.html#72
- Menu > Multimedia > AlsaMixer
- hit tab key so 'View:' moves from 'Playback' to 'Capture'
- hit cursor right key until on 'Mix'
- hit space bar so 'L CAPTUR R' text appears at 'Mix'
- hit cursor left key once to move to 'Capture'
- hit cursor up key until level on '13<>13'
- hit Esc key to exit AlsaMixer
You probably already knew. Still hope it's helpful,
JR

[/brief thread hijack]