sound recording with Fedora 11

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:34:19 -0600
Kevin Kempter <kevink at consistentstate.com> wrote:

> Hi all;
> 
> my son (the musician) has Fedora 11 installed on an HP HDX-16 laptop.
> 
> He wants to record some of his band sessions, we tried using 'sound recorder' 
> and plugging the output of his mixer into the mic input on the laptop.
> 
> It does record but the sound is fuzzy and to say it was poor quality would be 
> an over-estimate, since it's there but barely audible.
> 
> 
> Can anyone give us some direction per sound recorders for linux in general and 
> specifically how to debug & correct this issue with the mic input?

Same as any other audio system

Start by

- Making sure the deck output and the laptop input impedance match
- Probably you want line-in not mic
- Try and get the levels right each end - usual rule of thumb is that the
  analogue amps are most linear around 66%, digital doesn't matter.
- If at all possible use the digital input (and to be honest with the
  noise you get in a PC environment if you are doing anything remotely
  serious [1] then you probably want to get hardware with a digital input
  if the laptop doesn't have it anyway (eg a USB dongle)


Alan
[1] If you didn't spend $200+ on the microphones you probably aren't in
this category ;)