I foolishly volunteered to produce a CD from a minidisc of my choir singing in Peterborough Cathedral. After much googling I discovered that programs such as wavrec, sound-recorder or audacity ought to be able to take the output from the minidisc connected to the soundcard line-in and record the data in an analogue manner. This all sounded fine ... until I came actually to try to do it.
I'm using an iBook G4 (last November vintage) running a 2.4.23-pre5 version of Ben Herrenschmidt's kernel. Unfortunately there appears to be something dreadfully wrong with /dev/dsp: all three of the above-listed utilities give errors, viz. [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ sound-recorder -c2 -s44100 -b16 -fwav -S 1:00 -q temp3.wav Sound Recorder version 0.06 (Build on Mar 21 2004) Copyright (C) 1997-2000 by B. Warmerdam under GPL. This program is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. Setting recording limit to 60 seconds Record from dsp (no cdrom support). To end the recording press CTRL-C Error opening device: /dev/dsp Error during initialisation of soundcard. [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ wavrec -t 60 -s 48000 -S temp4.wav Permission denied: Opening audio device /dev/dsp [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ audacity PaHost_OpenStream: could not open /dev/dsp for O_RDWR PaHost_OpenStream: ERROR - result = -10000 PaHost_OpenStream: could not open /dev/dsp for O_RDONLY PaHost_OpenStream: ERROR - result = -10000 (and when I try to record anyway it pops up an alert box which says "Error while opening sound device. Please check the output device settings and the sample rate." and the command line errors accrue an extra line which says "Host error".) The permissions on /dev/dsp are: crw--w--w- 1 root audio 14, 3 Mar 14 2002 /dev/dsp I am in group audio. I downloaded the snd-data tar file, and tried catting endoftheworld to /dev/dsp as recommended in the sound HOWTO; I get some cacophanous noise and then the message cat: write error: No space left on device Unfortunately this situation isn't covered in the HOWTO! /dev/audio appears to behave as expected; it's just /dev/dsp which appears to be less than optimally functional. If at all possible, I'd rather avoid having to upgrade kernels, compile up ALSA, or anything that is likely to be time-consuming and might run the risk of X ceasing to work: I'm supposed to have these CDs done rather too soon for comfort! If anyone can suggest anything, I'd be pathetically grateful! Diana.
