Voice Recorder for 14.04

For few days I've been trying to find a voice recorder, but I'm frustrated.

Skype working fine and alsamixer

I'm using pulseaudio.

When I open the below softwares, my microphone stops working, even skype doesn't work. I only hear noise. If I uninstall the softwares and reset pulseaudio it becomes normal again.

Tried Audacity -- I hear noise only.
Tried audio-recorder -- Recording but lots of noise.

I need a good working software to record voice.

Need help.

2

9 Answers

You can very simply record audio through terminal using the pre-installed tool arecord.

1. Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T)

2. Run the command

   arecord filename.wav

3. Your audio recording has started, press Ctrl+C to stop the recording.

4. Your voice recording has been saved as filename.wav in your home directory.

EDIT:
If you have multiple inputs you can find them using

arecord -l

which will list hardware devices that can then be selected using the -D flag. Listing looks like...

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC269VB Analog [ALC269VB Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

When choosing a particular device I used the following to select a USB headset.

arecord -D hw:1,0 -f S16_LE filename.wav 

Note that the device selection was based on the following listing which comes straight from the -l listing.

card 1: Headset [HP Digital Stereo Headset], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

5

Try Audio Recorder.

Audio Recorder is a recording program, that allows user to record audio from various sources, and allows you to save recording in various formats.

To install, just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command(s) below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:osmoma/audio-recorder
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audio-recorder

For Ubuntu versions higher than 15.10 there is a new ppa which can be found at

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:audio-recorder/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audio-recorder

Make sure your microphone is connected to your computer and well configured. Run this command: alsamixer to check your microphone level.

Also you can use sox to record your voice, it can be installed from the Ubuntu Software Center, r install it from the terminal with this command:

sudo apt-get install sox

Edit

You can also look at Ardour.

Ardour is a powerful digital audio workstation that gives you everything you need to record, edit, mix, and arrange professional audio.^Ardour

To download, and more info, check out their website

Other programs to look at are MHWaveEdit, and KWave

10

I always prefer shell commandline, I use below command to record voice:

avconv -f pulse -i default /home/$USER/Music/$(date +"%m%d%Y_%H%M%S_$HOSTNAME")_screencast.wav

to stop it press q

UPDATE:

Ubuntu switched to FFMPEG again as of Ubuntu 15.04 "Vivid Vervet"

The above command will continue to work by replacing avconv with ffmpeg

ffmpeg -f pulse -i default /home/$USER/Music/$(date +"%m%d%Y_%H%M%S_$HOSTNAME")_screencast.wav

1

Another one to look for is gnome-sound-recorder, it was added in 2014. It is simple and just records input from the mic.

It is packaged 16.04 in the universe repo (named gnome-sound-recorder).

If you are looking for only voice recording I'd suggest QARecord. It's a very simple application built with QT.

Make sure that your microphone sound level is not muted and that you have your microphone selected and turned up in Audacity.

1

Yet another program to record voice is fmedia. You can start recording with a single command:

fmedia --record --out=rec.flac

and stop recording by pressing Ctrl+C.

fmedia uses ALSA, so it works even if PulseAudio is not installed on your system.

I know this is a hack, but it's the solution I opted for after trying quite a few of the solutions here and it worked perfectly.

I used the default voice recorder on my Android phone. There was no background noise (which I had with other software) and the interface was relatively friendly.

To transfer the files to my computer over wifi I used ES File Explorer (see section 16 here).

To convert the files from 3gp to mp3:

sudo apt-get install libav-tools
avconv -i YourInputFileName.3gp -c:a libmp3lame YourOutputFileName.mp3

Or to mass convert all:

cd /path/to/your/folder/
for x in `ls *.3gp`; do avconv -i $x -c:a libmp3lame $x.mp3; done
# If I wasn't too lazy I'd remove the .mp3 extension too.

And to concatenate to one recorded file I used mp3wrap (install also with apt-get)

ffmpeg + module-echo-cancel

I have managed to achieve good sound quality with low background noise by:

• install and enable module-echo-cancel as shown at:

• record with ffmpeg:

  sudo apt install ffmpeg
  ffmpeg -f alsa -i default -t 30 out.wav

I'm not sure why, but some recording methods don't seem to pick up the noise cancelling, on my tests so far:

• arecord: no
• recordmydesktop: no
• kazam: yes

but it might be a question of passing the right command line option to the ones that didn't.

Another possible advantage of ffmpeg arecord is that it might support more output formats/effects and save that directly to the output file. I'm not sure if this is a good idea (delays due to encoding/effects processing?), but it seems to work, e.g. save to mp3 and add a tremolo effect:

ffmpeg -f alsa -i default -af tremolo=d=0.8 -t 30 out.wav

Maybe if you know how filters work it is possible to do something from ffmpeg itself, e.g. with highpass/lowpass:

Tested in Ubuntu 20.04.

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