(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I have some audio cassettes (mostly voice, but some music) I'd like to convert to .mp3 files with Puppy. I've never actually done this, but it seems feasible enough.

The basic idea I have is to use a jack and plug the cassette player's output to the sound card input jack.

Could anyone explain by what procedure and soffware I'd need to capture and edit the sound files?

I think by the time this thread is finished we will have the material to make a good How-To.

I'd have thought that something like XS sound editor would be capable of something like this. You'd have to capture the incoming signal and save it as a file.

Converting it to MP3 may need a bit more work though.

I's never done it under puppy but it's easy to do with a program called Audacity. you could try and run it in puppy. It allows you to catpure the audio and save the file (or portions of it) as MP3s

Here's a post I made about ripping CDs and converting them to mp3. It probably won't do you much good, but who knows?

Don't forget to activate the appropriate channel in xtmix and turn up the volume. (Double click on the speaker icon in the lower right of your screen to open xtmix.)

I have found the XS sound editor to be very good. Audacity is a great program and we should have that as a dot pup - not sure how big it is. Once you are recording (getting an input, you can "save as" MP3)

Strangely enough the most difficult thing (when I did it with Audacity on Windows) was getting the right cable from the cassette player to the sound card - I would start there. Then try XS.

Good luck and keep us informed

Lobster wrote:<snip>
Strangely enough the most difficult thing (when I did it with Audacity on Windows) was getting the right cable from the cassette player to the sound card - I would start there. Then try XS.
<snip>

Use the line out/line in, if available, rather than the mic input. Line out is the output of the preamplifier and should generally work better for you.

Audacity is quite large (by puppy standards), over 1M, and may require some libraries that are not included in puppy, which would add even more space.
It's not large enough to maek it an impossibility though,s it's something to add to the "to look at" list

Audacity is quite large (by puppy standards), over 1M, and may require some libraries that are not included in puppy, which would add even more space.

14.9 MB by my measurements. But it looks like Audacity is the way to go. I didn't install it inside Puppy, rather in a directory on a partition with a link to it.

Thanks for the tips, I'll let you know.

BTW Puppy has a commandline utility called recwav which looks like it should be able to capture /dev/dsp input.

Bruce B wrote:<snip>
BTW Puppy has a commandline utility called recwav which looks like it should be able to capture /dev/dsp input.

It does? When I type 'recwav help' in rxvt (Puppy 1.0.3 CD) it says:
"recwav: No such file or directory" What am I doing wrong?

try recwav --help
or recwav -help
or recwav -h
or man recwav

(i'm not running Puppy right now)

'man recwav' is the only one that did anything. It gave a bunch of meaningless lines and popped up the Puppy 'Help' window, but 'recwav' was nowhere mentioned. Thanks for trying though.

Where do you suppose Bruce B found out about recwav?

Did I actually write recwav?

I am soo sorry, it is wavrec

Yesss, thanks. Wavrec brings something up in rxvt, but not much to go on. There is nothing about it in the Puppy Help files. How did you know it was there? What other undocumented programs are in Puppy?

Tux has his own Google search engine stored under a pile of fish here:
http://www.google.com/linux

Using that found this about wavrev
http://www.linux.org/lessons/beginner/l18/lesson18b.htm

now I can get both these commands running from the command line but not from a script

not sure why . . .
. . . probably something obvious - it usually is - has anyone else tried running this from a script

Flash wrote:Yesss, thanks. Wavrec brings something up in rxvt, but not much to go on. There is nothing about it in the Puppy Help files. How did you know it was there? What other undocumented programs are in Puppy?

I read something about wavrec and thought I'd check and see if it was installed, before I downloaded and installed it.

Maybe wavrec and others small utilities get installed as support files with other packages like Xripper, Gcombust, or XS sound editor or ??.

wavrec --help tells you pretty much out to use it.

Bruce B wrote:<snip>
I read something about wavrec and thought I'd check and see if it was installed, before I downloaded and installed it.

Good thinking!

Maybe wavrec and other small utilities get installed as support files with other packages like Xripper, Gcombust, or XS sound editor or ??.

Would that be one of those dependency things, or is that different?

wavrec --help tells you pretty much how to use it.

Thanks!

Has anybody tried ripperX.

XS should do the job without any trouble.
XS can save to any file format supported by the Snack library, which includes MP3.

There are some plugins for XS, that are supposed to be loaded at startup, except that XS couldn't find them -- I have fixed that for Pup 1.0.4.
The plugins are in 1.0.3, in /usr/lib/snack/ I think, so XS can load them -- there's a plugin loading thing in the menu.

If you just want to record audio cassettes, Audacity is an overkill.
...except, if it has some kind of hiss-reduction/background-noise-reduction capability, that would be useful, but perhaps that would be too much to ask of Audacity.

Ian wrote:Has anybody tried ripperX.

Yes indeed:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=3709#3709
But not for recording from line-in; only for ripping tracks from CDs (and converting them to mp3.)

I didn't know you could use it for recording. I'm not in Puppy right now so I can't check.

Here's Lobster's post on using XS sound editor to record.