Sunday, December 26, 2010

Setting Microphone Volume

Info from following urls:
  http://nixfrustrations.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/alsa-devices-from-cli-1/

    One of the things to take note while recording is that the microphone volume MUST not be set too high, else there will be feedback. From my recording experience with Audacity, the ideal microphone volume for my Eee PC is 20%.

    The problem is, the user might not always remember to check and set the microphone volume before recording. The solution - bash scripts. I added the following line to my bash script for launching Audacity in the Easy Mode GUI:

amixer -c 0 set Capture 20% cap unmute

   "-c 0" refers to sound card 0 (the integrated one) on my Eee PC.

   "cap unmute" is to turn the capture mode on and unmute the device specified.
 
   "set Capture" tells amixer to set the device named "Capture", which is the name of my microphone. To find out the name of your microphone device, you can type "amixer" in terminal mode and try to decipher the info, or type the following in terminal mode:

alsamixer -c 0 -V capture

    The above command will show the mixer devices used for recording. The one you should be looking for is the leftmost one. To confirm, adjust your microphone volume using the system tray icon in the GUI and run the command again to see if it is reflected.

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