Penguin (openclipart.org, public domain)
According to my last posting, I wanted to record some audio on my Linux Box. If you don’t want to use a fully flavoured digital audio workstation or sequencer, you can for example use qarecord or timemachine. First I tried timemachine.
My Ubuntu box provides a shortcut to timemachine in its desktop menu. I used it to start timemachine. It opened two ports to be connected via jackd. Just great. I pressed the only control in its interface – the record button – and started playing. I stopped recording and quit the application. Then I searched for the recorded file on my desktop and in my home directory. Huh, none so far. Temp-directory? No.
I opened a terminal window and typed timemachine --help. It listed a couple of valuable options. But there was no hint concerning the default path for recorded files. At least there was a prefix option for recorded files, which defaults to tm-. Ah, easy. Just use find to search for the recorded file:
find ~ -name tm-*
Ah, there is it. It’s in my documents folder. Intuitive, isn’t it?
I wanted to record another file and tried to start timemachine anew. But it didn’t start. I tried to start it from a terminal window, and it told me cannot read response from jack server (No such file or directory)
timemachine: jack server not running?
But jackd was still running. Restarting it didn’t solve the problem.
I finally ended using qarecord. It did the job, but as it currently is under heavy development, it crashed from time to time. I got my task done anyway. As a conclusion: For the average user, it is IMO impossible to get a simple task like recording some audio done in a reasonable period of time.
[¹] According to echo $RANDOM
