Audacity freezes when recording

[brisray]

When using the ine-in from my soundcard to record old audio cassette tapes Audacity just freezes. In fact, the system becmes so unmanageable it has to be rebooted.

I'm using Audacity 1.3.0 Beta with FC5 (build 1756). The soundcard is a Technology ES1978 Maestro 2E ESS. I've got 700+Mb of RAM

In volume control the following is checked...

Master, PCM, Line In, Cd, Microphone, PC Speaker, Capture, External Amplifier.

Anyone know how to fix this? Or maybe suggest another application to get the audio to the hard drive?

Ray

[brahms]

I usually just use arecord for audio capture:

arecord -f cd -t wav -D plughw -vv filename.wav

Use alsamixer to set the capture level.

[brisray]

Thanks for the reply. When I tried your method I get endles messages that "Max peak (11026 samples): 0x00000000 # 0%" I haven't used arecord before so I'll have to read the man for that.

Ray

[brisray]

Well something seems odd. On other systems when I've done tape to HD what I've done is simply run a cable from the headphone socket on the player to the line-in of the sound card. I tried that using arecord and get the message I just posted.

What I did after that was change the cable from the line-in to mic. The result is terrible, but I do get something.

Ray

[brahms]

Originally Posted by brisray

Thanks for the reply. When I tried your method I get endles messages that "Max peak (11026 samples): 0x00000000 # 0%" I haven't used arecord before so I'll have to read the man for that.

Yes - that's the -vv switch. I use it to keep an eye on the peak level when setting the line-in volume. You can leave it off once you're confident that the level is right.

Originally Posted by brisray

What I did after that was change the cable from the line-in to mic. The result is terrible, but I do get something.

Yes, it will sound bad using mic. Have you enabled the Line channel with alsamixer? In a terminal, type alsamixer, hit return. Use tab to display the capture channels, arrow keys to select Line, space to enable capture. Then go to the Capture channel to adjust the level. Hit escape to quit.

[brisray]

yes, I've done that. I can now get the right channel to record, but it doesn't sound good at all. The audio is distorted and when I look at the wave pattern in Audacity there are slight gaps in the audio.

I've also tried different cables and tape players.

I've also tried the various pcm options list from arecord -L

plughw is the only one that works, the others like plug, hw, shm etc give the errors "pcm is not defined", "missing field pcm" and "/etc/alsa/cards/aliases.conf may be old or corrupted".

Would it be worthwhile reinstalling alsa?
Apart from that the only other thing I can think of is to replace the soundcard.

Ray