GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 301638
Use the record function to play radio back through the soundcard
Last modified: 2012-11-16 13:29:16 UTC
I will start with an example from another domain, then actually state the feature request. If you look at the software CD players, there are two ways that their function is accomplished: 1. Just control the CD-ROM and let it play the sound via the direct cable between the unit and the soundcard 2. Essentially rip the CD and play the result in real time #1 is the most popular. #2 is used sometimes (even XMMS can do it!) because not always a cable is connected between the CD-ROM and the soundcard. Example: with a high-end card such as M-Audio Delta 1010 (that's what i'm using) there is actually no way to hook up the CD-ROM to the soundcard. It would be nice to see the same feature in gnomeradio - namely, to play the radio not via the cable between the TV/radio tuner and the soundcard, but instead use the same infrastructure like the record function and just play the stream back to the sound card like any other PCM application (WAV player). This will enable people like me to actually use their radio tuners.
Hmm, I'm not sure I understand this? Can you read this http://www.charmed.com/txt/btaudio.txt, and tell me if that is what you have in mind? I'd have to do some testing, but that would probably be not too difficult to implement...
Answer to comment #1 I am not familiar with all the ways one could implement it, but functionally yes, that would accomplish what i was suggesting. Whatever the implementation, what i am suggesting is a way to support people that do not have a cable between the TV card and the sound card. That's actually a fairly common situation in the high-end Linux audio space, as the pro sound cards typically don't have analog internal CD connectors. This will also improve the sound quality, as the signal is not run through a cascade of analog-to-digital-to-analog-... converters. With my suggestion, the signal is digitised once (by the TV card) and it's either never converted to analog (when recording to file) or converted only once by the sound card (when playing to speakers). I know, quality is not so critical for FM radio; it's much critical for audio CDs, which is probably why software CD players such as XMMS or alsaplayer already have this feature. MythTV as well offers this direct capture mode for sound. I am using it with success on my system equipped with a Delta 1010 card (no internal analog connector). If implemented, it will make gnomeradio the only open source radio app that has this feature, so far.
I probably don't have time to implement this. So if someone wants to write a patch, that would be very welcome...
I think this is the source of all the "no sound" complaints that pop up in other bugreports. Their radiocard isn't connected to their soundcard, and gnomeradio doesn't provide another way to play the sound. It took me a long time too to figure out a way to make it play, so it might be a nice addition to gnomeradio. This problem can be solved with a simple gstreamer pipeline, which connects the oss device from the radiocard to some outputsink: osssrc device=/dev/dsp1 ! "audio/x-raw-int,rate=32000" ! alsasink I could write a little patch to add this pipeline, but it would be nicer if it gets integrated with the recording functionality. Unfortunately, i lack the experience to do so.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, this module is dead, so it won't recive more bug fixes nor updates.
According to its developer, gnomeradio is not under active development anymore. It is unlikely that there will be any further active development. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping - Please feel free to reopen this bug report in the future if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.