recording wavs

[Michael Hipp]

Squabsy wrote:
> Yes I noticed that and was going to have a play with it myself.
> Can you set the bit rate and the hz from the command line ?

Yes. It has several of the most common options. There is a companion 
'play' command that takes the same options. The man page tells all.

I recompiled 'sox' from source because the silly version that came with 
Red Hat didn't have mp3 support compiled-in. I used it last night to 
record a 40 min stereo wav. Came to 36.8MB and worked flawlessly. Then 
used 'sox testcd.wav testcd.mp3' to convert it to mp3. The conversion 
took forever (almost as long as the recording) but that's on this aged 
PII-233. The compression reduced it to 9% of original size.

I love the fancy GUI tools like Audacity, but the CLI is just far more 
deterministic for things that need to be done right, and consistently 
and then I can even script and automate the conversion to mp3. Beats 
endless mouse clicking any day. The fact that Audacity natively uses its 
own file format doesn't help either.

Michael