Audio recording in linux

How to Record System Sound on Linux

One of the best parts about Linux is that as a creative workstation, it’s an incredibly viable contender. For audio creation, for example, there are some excellent industry standards available to users, like Audacity and Ardour, and overall, it’s a powerful and flexible system. This tutorial shows you how to record system sound in Linux, both from a microphone and your system, using Audacity and PulseAudio.

Installing Audacity

Audacity is available in a wide variety of distros. It’s generally available in the main repositories.

For Debian/Ubuntu/Ubuntu-based distro:

If you prefer Snaps or Flatpaks, those are also both available as well.

Installing PulseAudio Volume Control

This is the application you’ll be using to record audio from the system. It’s a great way to snag audio from videos, songs, or other media to use for a later date. If you’ve ever wondered how people get high-quality audio samples, this is one way to do it.

PulseAudio Volume Control is available in most major repositories. You’ll use the same commands as above to install it.

For Debian/Ubuntu/Ubuntu-based distro:

PulseAudio Volume Control is also available as a Flatpak but not as a Snap.

Recording Sound from a Microphone

With your microphone plugged in to your system, open Audacity. It should automatically find your hardware and open up ready to record.

Just click the big red record button, and you’re recording. It’s as simple as that! Audacity is such a simple tool to use that it’s hard to go wrong.

Recording Sound from Your System

This one is a little more complicated. Hit the record button, just like above. This will start recording from your microphone. After you’re already recording, open PulseAudio Volume Control and navigate your way to the “Recording” tab.

Click on the drop-down menu that says: “ALSA plug-in [audacity]… from.”

Choose the option that says: “Monitor of Built-In Analog Stereo.” This will keep track of what information applications are sending to PulseAudio and record that rather than the sound coming in from your microphone.

From there, go ahead and play whatever sound you’d like, and you’ll see that sound showing up in Audacity as it plays. You can stop recording, scrub through playback, and treat whatever sound you’re recording just like any other audio input into Audacity.

I hope you learned a useful thing or two about Audacity and PulseAudio Volume Control. Now that you know how to record your system sound in Linux, make sure to check out some of our other Linux audio articles, such as improving your audio with PulseEffects, how to use ALSA utilities to manage audio from the terminal, and the essential tools for producing high-quality podcasts in Linux.

John is a young technical professional with a passion for educating users on the best ways to use their technology. He holds technical certifications covering topics ranging from computer hardware to cybersecurity to Linux system administration.

4 comments

Audacity is the best sound application around. I started using Audacity (open source) on Windows, and continued when switching to Linux. If you do anything with sound, Audacity is a must in my opinion.

“Hit the record button, just like above. This will start recording from your microphone. After you’re already recording…”
Is there a way to use Audacity to record sound from my system if I don’t have a microphone?

thank you for the tip
i already installed audacity but i was missing pavucontrol to achieve.
My son asked me to record minecraft games with discord vocals . Poor boy, his friends use to explain him solutions for Windows. He’s not independant yet with his own computer he was’nt allowed to install Windows on :/

Thank you so much for this article! I found it extremely helpful and exactly what I was looking for!

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Tutorial — Recording Computer Playback on Linux

Copyright or website restrictions may prevent you recording or distributing material. Check first.

PulseAudio

PulseAudio is a sound server providing professional audio features such as mixing and input/output routing. It is the default audio device on many Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint and many Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions. PulseAudio operates as a proxy between sound applications and the audio hardware (usually via ALSA). PulseAudio Volume Control provides a «Monitor» device which listens for the audio output of other applications such as Firefox or Rhythmbox. Setting PulseAudio Volume Control to capture from the Monitor device lets Audacity record computer playback when its input device is set to pulse.

1. If not already installed, add PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol) to your system. This is usually available in the distribution’s repository.
2. Ensure that PulseAudio is running. In Audacity’s Device Toolbar, set the Host to ALSA and the recording device to pulse.
   • On systems where PulseAudio is the default sound system the recording device may be set to default.
   • Audacity’s playback device may be set to pulse or to any available audio interface.

   

3. Ensure that «Software Playthrough» is not enabled in the Transport Menu then left-click on the Recording Meter to turn monitoring on.
4. Open PulseAudio Volume Control and choose the «Recording» tab.
5. In the «Capture from» dropdown, select the «Monitor» option of the playback device used by the application you want to record from, as shown below:
6. Launch the application that you wish to record and begin playback.
7. In the «Recording» tab of PulseAudio Volume Control, drag the volume sliders so that the recording level in Audacity’s Recording Meter is to left of 0 dB (-6 dB is a good level to aim for).
   • The playback level of the application being recorded will also affect the level of the recording. Use the «Playback» tab in PulseAudio Volume Control or the volume control in the application to adjust the output level.
   • If you want to record without hearing the audio, you can turn down the Audacity playback slider or turn down the sliders on the Output Devices tab of PulseAudio Volume Control. Do not use the Mute button in PulseAudio Volume Control, because this will cause Audacity to record silence. You can also set the port on the Output Devices tab of PulseAudio volume control to the audio output such as «headphones» but not connect any headphones or speakers to the port.
8. When the recording level has been correctly adjusted, press the Record button in Audacity .

For a detailed description using Ubuntu 10, see Stereo Mix with Ubuntu 10 on the Audacity wiki.

Jack Audio System is commonly used in Linux distributions that specialise in media creation such as Ubuntu Studio and Studio 64.

To use Audacity with Jack it is useful or in some cases essential to have a few additional packages installed. This documentation assumes that you have Jack Audio System working on your machine. For help with setting up Jack, please consult the documentation for your Linux distribution.

Recording sounds playing from other applications is rather easy with Jack. Jack may be started using QjackCtl or from the command-line. If Audacity is launched after Jack is started then «Jack Audio Connection Kit» will be an available host option in the Device Toolbar. If Jack is started after Audacity has been launched then it will be necessary to Transport > Rescan Audio Devices for new audio devices before jack is available to Audacity.

Any Jack-compatible applications that are running before Audacity is launched will have their ports available in Device Toolbar. To make an application available to Audacity that is launched after Audacity it is necessary to use Rescan Audio Devices in the Transport Menu. After rescanning audio devices, input and output ports from other applications will be available in the Recording and Playback boxes in Device Toolbar.

In this image the output of Hydrogen drum machine is being selected as the recording source. This will enable Audacity to record directly from the audio output from Hydrogen. If «System» is selected as the recording source then Audacity will record from the physical audio interface input.

Applications that do not directly support Jack may also be used with Jack on a system that uses PulseAudio (such as Ubuntu and Debian based distributions) by installing «pulseaudio-module-jack». This provides the modules «Jack Source» and «Jack Sink» that allow PulseAudio to use Jack. For example, to record sounds playing through Firefox, PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol) can be used to direct the output from Firefox to Jack Sink. The recording input for Audacity can then be set to record from «PulseAudio Jack Sink» and the sound will be recorded.

Other Methods

Alternative programs for recording computer playback

An alternative to recording streaming audio from the Internet is to download the data directly to disk, either by using command-line tools such as streamripper or mplayer, or with a browser plug-in (many available for Firefox), or writing the stream to disk from a media player such as VLC or xmms, or using a graphical down-loader such as streamtuner.

Use a loopback cable

This is a simple and effective method of recording what is playing on the computer. It has the disadvantage that the audio signal is converted from digital to analog, then from analog to digital, instead of staying in the digital domain. This may result in some slight increase in noise and distortion.

Plug your line-out or headphones-out to the line-in using a cable with a stereo mini-plug at each end, then record from line-in. To hear the sound while recording, use a single to double stereo connector to give you a jack for the speakers or headphones.

If you have only mic-in and no line-in is selectable through alsamixer, you can build an attenuator to reduce the line level output to a level suitable for mic-in. But probably this will only provide mono recording, because mic-in is mono in most cases. As well, the quality may be questionable.

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Audio recording in linux

Recording any sound that goes through your computer is a feature that you don’t have to miss out. Mostly if this sound is music. There are lots of internet streaming mp3 sources that stream audio that you can listen with your computer and why not, you can record to mp3 and have an enormous mp3 library. In this howto I’m going to give you powerful tools to record sound directly to an mp3 file or ogg file from the command line. So, you will be able to record for hours and hours your favourite music without having to worry about your hard disk space.

First of all you have to set up the recording channels by doing

alsamixer

Once there, select the capture view by typing the tab key. You’ll get the next screen:

With the arrow keys select the column Capture and set it to the CAPTUR mode with the space key as in the screenshot. Adjust the recording volume with the arrow keys. You can also set it up with the gnome volume control panel going to the capture tab.

Recording sound to an mp3 file

You’ll need the lame mp3 encoder. Install it by doing

sudo apt-get install lame

Type the following command

arecord -f cd -t raw | lame -x -r – out.mp3

Arecord captures the audio that goes through your computer and pipes it to the lame encoder, so you encode the audio directly to an mp3 file. You can specify more options to the lame encoder such as the bitrate with lame -x -b bitrate. Without specifying the bitrate it encodes to 128kbps constant bit rate cbr. If you want to record for an specific amount of time then:

arecord -f cd -d numberofseconds -t raw | lame -x -r – out.mp3

Recording sound to an ogg file

You’ll need the oggenc (the ogg encoder). Install it by doing

sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools

Type the following command

arecord -f cd -t raw | oggenc – -r -o out.ogg

And you’ll get your sound recorded to an ogg file. Take into account that we record directly to a compressed file, so there’s nothing in between, so you can record for hours saving an incredible amount of hard disk space.

Ripping shoutcast audio streaming

Streamripper allows us to rip audio streaming servers. Install it by typing

sudo apt-get install streamripper

You can connect to any shoutcast radio station with xmms. Once playing get the info and write down the url. Then type:

streamripper url

and you’ll get each song in a separate mp3 file.

Enjoy recording. 🙂
Interesting audio applications.

Audacity-Editing mp3/ogg files

Streamripper-ripping audio streaming servers

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