I currently have a low power Intel Atom motherboard set up to play owl calls at night followed by recording about 20 seconds of audio right after playing the owl call. My current setup uses the alsa "aplay" and "arecord" commands. Once the data is recorded, it is sent to the internet where I check if any owls responded to the call (the setup is in a remote location with a wireless connection back to the main office). I hope to learn when different owls are in the area. My current setup is operating but I want less power.  It is on a battery now and will be solar powered soon.

I decided to try and port everything to my Router Station. The USB audio device is a "ID 0c45:1677 Microdia" attached to the USB port and seems to be working great.

I decided to test Backfire 10.03-rc1. Everything installs and works except that "arecord" is missing.  "aplay" is there and works good. Also, "alsamixer" is working as well as "amixer" There is a program called "rec" which wants me to create a group called "audio". I tried just "cat"ing the audio to "rec" but did not have much luck with that either. I don't know how to create a new group with backfire. There may be a package I can install to do this but I am not sure which one it is.  The best solution for me would be for "arecord" to be available.  Seems like all the alsa tools are available but "arecord".

I did see where someone mentioned "bplay" but I can't find it in "backfire". Like I mentioned before, having "arecord" installed would be perfect!  Any ideas?

Steve

OK, not too hard to fix.  I was wrong in that "aplay" also did not work.

I created a softlink from "arecord" to "aplay" looks like "arecord" is built into "aplay", which is why I could not find it. Would be nice if the link was created during the make or package install process. This might be a bug.

I then added a group to /etc/groups:

audio:x:1:

I then did a "chgrp audio /dev/audio"

I played a WAV file and it worked.  I then brought up a second window and started alsamixer, so I could tweak things (probably should hit F5 after starting alsamixer).  In the first window, I did "arecord | aplay". Headphones would be smart here to avoid feedback.

I had to mute the Mic input so I could hear sound from the Mic CAPTURE input.

I hope this might help someone else in the future. It might help me tomorrow when I forgot how I did it!

Steve