audio problem solved on FC2.

[David Bruzos]

Hello everyone:
A few days ago a posted a message about my FC2 not recording sound.  Well, now it is working great:
I am not sure why I was not getting any sound from the sound card, but I downloaded the latest developement alsa rpms 
from the Fedora repos and updated my system.  After that, my system started recording again.  However, the sound quality 
was terible, it sounded very distorded and it was only recording at 8K Hz.  The good news is that I found out why!

Well, it turns out that when you use the "rec" utility from the sox package to record sound, it uses the OSS emulation 
layer that alsa provides.  You don't want to do this, because it is weres than using the old OSS sound system.  It is 
only provided to allow compatibility with older Linux programs that can not use the alsa devices directly.  When ever 
you can, don't use the /dev/dsp device, try to use the alsa output/input methods instead.

So, what you have to do is get a real audio recording package.  I downloaded "ecasound" and a command like:

$ ecasound -i:alsahw,0,0 -o test.ogg

Produced the best sound I have ever heard from my computer!  No distortion or anything and I can record at 44100 Hz 
(stereo) with no problems (using my Sound Blaster Life!).  Ecasound is a wonderful program that can do many many 
things with audio.  It can record from multiple soundcards at the same time, it can put the output to other devices or 
multiple audio formats at the same time (OGG, MP3, WAV, FLAC, whatever), it can apply over 40 effects to the sound (on 
the fly) and about a thousand other things...

It is a very powerful multi-track recorder and it is fully accessible from the command line.  The only thing is that the 
commands can get rather long and complex, and it can be intimidating at first.  The sound quality is great though.

Oh, my USB mic works very well too.  I can record at 44100 Hz 16 bit without a problem...

Hopefully someone finds this info useful...

David B.