Comments on: recording from PulseAudio

By: Al Williams

Al Williams — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:24:51 +0000

Just what I was looking for. I did make a slight change:

#!/bin/bash
WAV=”$1″
if [ -z "$WAV" ]; then
echo 1>&2 Usage: pa-rec wavefile
exit 1
fi
rm -f “$WAV”
# Get sink monitor:
MONITORS=$(pactl list | egrep -A2 ‘^(\*\*\* )?Source #’ | grep ‘Name: .*\.monitor$’ | awk ‘{print $NF ” ” $NF }’)
MONITOR=$(kdialog –menu “Select Monitor:” $MONITORS)
echo “set-source-mute ${MONITOR} false” | pacmd >/dev/null
# Record it raw, and convert to a wav
echo “Recording $MONITOR to $WAV …”
echo “^C to stop”
parec -d $MONITOR | sox -t raw -r 44k -sLb 16 -c 2 – $WAV

Obviously I use KDE.

By: kees

kees — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:01:59 +0000

Thanks for the updates! I’ve adjusted the script for new “pactl list” output and added the unmuting.

By: eric

eric — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 22:05:41 +0000

Very useful script.
On my machine I had to insert these lines before recording:

# Unmute monitor :
echo “set-source-mute ${MONITOR} false” | pacmd

Without them I was just recording silence..

By: kaapstorm

kaapstorm — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:38:59 +0000

(Sorry about that. That regex should be “^Source”, not “^\Source”. The “\” will be ignored, so it doesn’t really matter. But I’m picky.)

By: kaapstorm

kaapstorm — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:36:28 +0000

pactl found in Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) has slightly different output. Change lines 10 and 11 to:

MONITOR=$(pactl list | grep -A2 ‘^\Source ‘ | \
grep ‘Name: .*\.monitor$’ | cut -d” ” -f2)

By: josef

josef — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 10:11:51 +0000

pactl is a localised application so you should call it with LANG=C.

By: Jahil

Jahil — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:53:29 +0000

Can we do same thing with ffmpeg?

By: Youch

Youch — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:17:17 +0000

Thank you for this script !
I added the ability to start when a sound occurs and to split in multiple files after 2s of silence. Just replace the line begining with “parec -d “$MONITOR” | sox…” with this one :
parec -d “$MONITOR” | sox -t raw -r 44100 -sLb 16 -c 2 – “$WAV” silence 1 0.50 0.1% 1 2.0 0.1% : newfile : restart

By: Ben Smith

Ben Smith — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:24:39 +0000

Thanks so much. I just wasted a bunch of time trying to do this the wrong way and it is such a relief to have found your solution.

By: kees

kees — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:39:46 +0000

Update the script for more recent PulseAudio (as found in Karmic):
http://outflux.net/software/pa-clone

By: hacklschorsch

hacklschorsch — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:39:55 +0000

Thanks, works great!

I replaced “44k” by “44100″. This avoids the SOX problem pointed out by vadim, kees and 3pipe and, at the same time, gets you 44.1khz files, not 44khz ones.

(44.1khz is what you’d want for burning on CDs or converting to MP3)

By: the_phoenix

the_phoenix — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:47:31 +0000

Excellent, thanks for that: works a treat!

By: Ben B

Ben B — Sat, 16 May 2009 03:41:12 +0000

Thanks for the quick and easy solution to ‘loop back’ recording. I like this variation, for outputting an ogg file:
parec –format=s16le –device=”$MONITOR” | oggenc –raw –quiet –quality=4 -o $WAV -

By: Vadim P.

Vadim P. — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:07:21 +0000

Thanks xuzo! Your script worked great.

By: xuzo

xuzo — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:35:42 +0000

The GStreamer version :)

$ gst-launch-0.10 pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A1 ‘^\*\*\* Source #’ | \
grep ‘^Name: .*\.monitor$’ | cut -d” ” -f2 | tail -n1) \
! queue ! audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 \
! audioconvert ! lame vbr=4 vbr-quality=2 \
! filesink location=dump.mp3

By: kees

kees — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:17:39 +0000

The sox from Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) works for this example. If you can’t use sox, just record to the raw file, and import it manually into audacity or something to save it.

By: 3pipe

3pipe — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:50:48 +0000

Would you provide a link for an updated sox? The latest version in the Ubuntu repositories still causes this problem. Thanks.

By: kees

kees — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:14:00 +0000

Right, you need a newer sox for that command line.

By: Vadim P.

Vadim P. — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:05:33 +0000

Hehe: sox sox: Rate value `44k’ is not a positive number

Full info here: http://paste.pocoo.org/show/113298/