I remember that I had to search high and low for a simple-ish solution to my need to record sound from my computer. My specific example is due to the podcast that I record remotely. Others may want to record a movie clip, or a song to convert into a ringtone. Either way, Hardy Heron doesn't make this as easily as I'd like.

I use Audacity for all of my podcasting and music mixing. There are other free options out there, but for the sake of this blog we're going to record sound using Audacity.

First, double-click the volume control icon found in your top panel. In my install it is on the top right of my main screen.

Go to Edit > Preferences and make sure you have a check mark by the following: Master, PCM, Line-in, Line-in Capture, CD, CD Capture, Microphone, Microphone Capture, IEC958 Output, PC Speaker, Mix, and Duplicate Front. I'm not sure you need all of these, but this is how I got it to work. :)


Next make sure that you have unmuted all of the options except the PC speaker. Increase the volume as well. Here's how mine looks:


Next click on the Switches tab and check Mix as well as IEC958 Output and close the window. Again, not sure if you need IEC958 Output, but this is what's working.

Next you'll want to go to System > Preferences > Sound. Change all of the devices to use ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture except the Default Mixer Tracks. That one should be VIA 8237 (Alsa Mixer). Click Close.



Now one final step before you can test!

Open Audacity and click on Edit > Preferences. You should see two options for the Audio I/O. Make sure that the Playback device is ALSA: default and Recording is ALSA: VIA 8237: VIA 8237 (hw:0,0) and click OK.


Now you can test! The easy way to test this is to fire up your music player and play a file from your computer. Open Audacity and click the Record button. You should see the blue line jumping up and down as it captures sound.



Hope this helps someone out there. I know I may need to come back to this blog should I ever rebuild or need to help someone else.

The past few weeks I've been working hard to straighten out my data as well as my computer. It's not an easy task sometimes, but it really needs to be done to keep things organized and your data safe.

First, I maintain several sites and this one always seems to fall behind. It's that whole "last but not least" theory I suppose. Over the weekend I dusted off my SQL skills and cleaned up my comments. I had some where in the neighborhood of 50,000 spam comments and I really wish I were exaggerating. I didn't want to delete my older comments, so I had to use several SQL statements to pick out the junk and delete the items. I think I have it all gone, except for a few that are not published which can be deleted with a few clicks in my admin panel.

I also made a few graphical changes to my site, including the sheep thoughts and the extras on the right nav. I integrated Last.fm to show my latest tracks, as well as my shared items on Google Reader.

Next is organizing data on my computer. I have a pretty old machine as far as computers go these days. I purchased this computer in late 2003 and have only added a bit of memory and a better graphics card to keep it humming along. As I mentioned before, I got the bright idea to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu. When I did the partition, something failed and I lost the ability to boot to Windows at all.

No worries, I'm using Ubuntu (Hardy Heron version) and loving it. So far there isn't anything much that I'm missing. I've traded in PhotoShop for Gimp, iTunes for Banshee, Office for Open Office, Outlook for Thunderbird, and I was able to keep my wonderful Firefox just fine. I'm loving the ability to think boy I wish I had an application that would help me keep track of my notes and then I just Google it and find one for free. One big giant reason to switch to Linux is the cost. It runs on my computer so much better and faster than Windows, and using an appliction like Gimp over PhotoShop can save you around $600 (at least).

If you want to see some of the very much free applications you can install, just check out Appnr - which also makes installing these apps much easier for the less Linux saavy.

Anyway, I digress. My love for Ubuntu is known and I will work to switch everyone who ever complained about the expense and propritary nature of Macs and the numerous lock ups and slowness of Windows.

All that said, I'm ready to blow away my XP partition altogether. One of the reasons I've left it alone for now is so that I could back up my data before I rebuild. That's what I'm doing this week. Moving and organizing my data to our back up servers so I can do a fresh rebuild.

Even though I can't boot XP, I can access all the files over there and move them to the server for safe keeping. Once that's done, I'll back up my install of Ubuntu and then rebuild my entire computer using only Ubuntu. If I need XP (hahahaha!) I'll use a virtual box.

I know how hard it is to read an entire blog and not get to see any pretty pictures, so schooch on over to Flickr to see a screen shot of my desktop and read the notes about what's what.