I’m going down to San Diego (probably driving down Sunday) for OSCON and am bringing the ol’ TiBook so I can get some work done and all that (if I had one wish for Mac laptops it’d be for a right click button.)
In preparation for the conference, I thought I’d try to see if I could do audio recording with this thing. There’s a suprisingly decent microphone built into the left speaker, but I was hoping to get something better. Unfortunately, there’s no audio in / mic input so I’d have to buy one somewhere. Griffin Technology’s iMic seems like the best option, but unfortunately the site doesn’t list anywhere locally where I can pick it up. I’ll probably give fries a ring and see what they have before I take off I suppose.
I also started looking around for software. AudioX is a nice little free application that will record Quicktime .mov audio files, but unfortunately seems to only support recording at 16-bit 44.1KHz. That’s a large bitstream. A shareware application called Audiocorder is better in this regard, it allows 11 and 22 KHz and 8 bit recording. Unfortunately, encoding is either AIFF or WAV. I believe this is due to what’s built into the QT/OS X, but really you’d think there’d be an easy way to add extra filters or something. I’m sure there’s some way to do it, but quite a bit of googling turned up nothing. It’s actually sort of sad when comparing this to the number of audio codecs built into Windows, and how easy it is to add an ACM / DirectShow filters as extra filters. So much for Apple’s vaunted ease of use.
While Audiocorder has some neat features (voice activation, a cool levels display being among them) I believe I will be going the command line route. esound was a cinch to install with fink. I downloaded a LAME binary (not before first downloading the 231MB Dev Tools package only to find the image corrupted), and was off an running. File size is about 1/4 of a 11KHz/8bit mono AIFF from Audiocorder, with better much better quality. An hour of audio is about 14MB at 32kbps (22KHz mono) which sounds great. I originally started out with a 64kbps stream, but it’s really not necessary. There’s no visual levels, but well worth giving up for the performance/quality (only takes about 15% cpu on this tired old G4/400). I’m wrote this into a shell script to do some neat stuff (takes the input, does some file renaming if necessary) , but the gist of it is this:
esdrec | lame -b 32 -m m -a - output.mp3
Pretty easy breezy.