Record with your microphone in the simplest way possible (for KDE, Gnome, Unity, Xfce, etc)

For a few days I was wanting to finish some video tutorials about something new that I have learned, I wanted to use a microphone to record my voice explaining what I was doing in the terminal, while in it I was writing commands and etc.

I had the problem when I asked myself: What application to use to record? ...

If you use Gnome you have one that is called more or less «gnome-sound-record»Or something like that, but since I refuse to use Gnome applications I gave myself the task of looking for some Qt application (that is, for KDE) that would allow me to record the audio.

I looked in the same Debian repository and found some applications that did many things, including recording the audio from the mic ... however, it was not what I wanted. I don't want to install a sound editor and open it just to record, I consider it absurd, and there I found: arerecord

arerecord is an application that has only one purpose: Record !.

I installed it on my Debian as it can be installed on Ubuntu or similar:

sudo apt-get install alsa-utils

Then using it is really VERY simple, just press [Alt] + [F2], write the following and press [enter]:

arecord ~ ​​/ recording.mp3

Here I show you the small screenshot:

And this will be enough so that in our home (personal folder) a file called «recording.mp3»That good… is the audio that is being recorded by the microphone.

Ok now ... how to stop recording?

In a simple way too 😉… we press [Alt] + [F2], we write the following and press [enter]:

killall arecord

This is enough to kill the application (arerecord).

They can also open the System Monitor and where the processes are, look for arerecord and they right click + kill ... or stop, or whatever option they like lol.

And in terminal?

This is to do it in a completely graphical way, because we can also execute arerecord using the terminal, just type arecord ~ ​​/ recording.mp3 in a terminal to start recording, and then when we want to stop recording we simply press [Ctrl] + [C]. I show you a screenshot:

Nothing that everything is very simple ... an application that does not need many things or options, simply record when it is told, and stop when it is told lol.

However, arerecord yes it has a lot of options ... you can see them by typing in a terminal:

man arecord

Well this is it.

regards


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  1.   ezitoc said

    Genial!

    Thanks for sharing.

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      A pleasure 🙂

  2.   Oscar said

    I see you got the genie out of the lamp, thanks friend for the tuto.

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      A taste 🙂

  3.   Francis said

    What would be interesting is to record the microphone and the desktop at the same time

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      Well, I have a personal script to record the desktop, and one to record the audio ... just yesterday I started to put these two together, to make one that records both things hahahaha.

      1.    anonym said

        Have you considered using the following for this task?:

        Istanbul (https://live.gnome.org/Istanbul)

        recordmydesktop including its interface gtk-recordMyDesktop (recordmydesktop.sf.net/about.php)

        1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

          Yes, I tried it and everything is fine ... as long as it is not a very long video. I only recorded 10 minutes, and there was no way that when I stopped recording, it would return the video to me 🙁

  4.   xfce said

    The package you say to install does not exist in Debian / Testing (and I suppose it does not in the others). The good one is alsa-utils, which is the one that contains the arecord command (see it with apt-cache show alsa-utils).

    The file that you get with the command: arecord recording.mp3, is not an mp3, it is a wav. Watch it with:
    $ file recording.mp3
    recording.mp3: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 8 bit, 8000 Hz mono

    So the proper name, so as not to be mistaken, would be recording.wav. You're welcome :-D.

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      Oh right, huge mistake of mine O_O.
      I already corrected the post, really thank you very much for the warning.

  5.   rots87 said

    hahaha very good ... in fact I had not thought about doing that, the bad thing is that it cannot be combined at the moment; I would have to edit it with Cinelerra (I think that's how it is written)

  6.   truko22 said

    Thanks 0 /

  7.   pavloco said

    This very interesting, will there be something like that to record video?

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      Yes, I am just finishing an app that will allow this in a simple way 😉

  8.   Mystog @ N said

    To record the desktop I use this command:

    ffmpeg -f x11grab -s sga -r 25 -i: 0.0 -sameq ~ / my_recording_name.mpg

    So if you can make a function that records both at the same time and then with ffmpeg itself, one can join them in a single file, well done.

  9.   j said

    great! to try it was said

  10.   willarmand said

    Very interesting program, my question is if it can be programmed to start recording and stop at a certain time with cron in order to make it automated?

  11.   Hello said

    I give you my script to capture the webcam audio in case it works for someone:

    #! / Bin / sh
    USER = user
    DATE =date +%Y_%m_%d_%k:%M:%S
    ffmpeg -f alsa -i "plughw: CARD = Camera, DEV = 0" -ab 64k /home/usuario/$DATE.mp3

  12.   Gamer1 said

    Thanks as always Gaara, I have been following the contributions you make in this blog that is not wasted, 😀 very useful especially for making gameplay that gives a lot of energy to open a heavy audio or video editor such as audacity or kdenlive just to record with the microphone, like this There are no crashing problems anymore because with what the capturer occupies it does not let me do much :: D.

  13.   sabatino said

    gem, thank you crazy old woman