GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 370629
unable to record sound
Last modified: 2018-07-02 10:51:29 UTC
I check "Record Sound" but no sound is recorded. What is necessary for that ?
Hi You need to set your audio source correctly in: System, Preferences, Multimedia Systems Selector and use the test facility in there to confirm you actually get your mic etc. recorded correctly.
Ok, I missunerstund this feature, my fault. I thought it can record sound played by any application on desktop, while recording.
I was also confused by this, it might make sense to rename 'Record Sound' to something that makes it more clear it isn't recording sound coming from your desktop but sound coming from an input device.
It's possible if you tell KDE's (in my case) kmix that it should use PCM as input. Just drag PCM to 100% and everything else to 0%.
I too am having problems with sound, I am trying to record my microphone. When I finish my screencast and click to encode, the icon changes to the hard drive and it just sits there. If I turn off record sound, it completes and asks me where I would like to save it. Marc-
I'm seeing the same problem as Marc Mance above. I use Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon (which uses Gnome 2.20.1), and I can successfully record sound from my microphone in Gnome's "Sound Recorder" (found in "Applications" -> "Sound & Video"). Also, when I go into "System" -> "Preferences" -> "Sound", under "Audio Conferencing", I have "ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture" selected, and when I press the "Test" button, when I speak into the microphone, my own voice plays back to me with a slight delay. So I know my microphone works. Perhaps when Zaheer mentions to go into "System, Preferences, Multimedia Systems Selector" above, he really means to go into "System" -> "Preferences" -> "Sound". Zaheer, can you clarify that? You might also want to change the wording shown by your tooltip shown in my first screenshot attached (called istanbul_where_are_preferences.png) to reflect this. Also, Let me elaborate on just what happens when istanbul freezes upon saving (when "enable sound" is checked). The istanbul process goes from taking lots of CPU to taking 0% CPU. Then it sits there forever, and never saves. One has to eventually kill the istanbul process manually, because right-clicking the hard drive icon (that the istanbul applet has become) does nothing. See second screenshot attached, called istanbul_frozen_while_saving_to_disk_when_audio_enabled.png I'm also confused because I'm not sure which particular audio input device istanbul is recoding from. I have 2 sound cards: a cheap onboard sound chipset (which gnome wants to use by default), and a nicer Sound Blaster Live PCI card. Note that I had to tell Gnome to use the SB card by default by using the commands shown here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=546793 Zaheer, is there some way I can confirm that istanbul is indeed listening to my SB's microphone (which the rest of Gnome correctly does for me)?
Created attachment 103153 [details] Istanbul tooltip for "Record Sound" refers to "Multimedia Systems Selector in Preferences", but that's vague.
Created attachment 103154 [details] a screenshot showing that when "Record Sound" is enabled, istabul freezes at the time of saving the video
A further clarification: when I said above: Also, when I go into "System" -> "Preferences" -> "Sound", under "Audio Conferencing", I have "ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture" selected ...above, what I meant was: Also, when I go into "System" -> "Preferences" -> "Sound", under "Audio Conferencing", I have "ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture" selected for "Sound capture" So maybe a good question to ask is this: does istanbul automatically record audio using whatever is selected in this "Sound capture"? And if so, would it/should it have a problem if I were to choose "ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture," which does appear to work for me when I test it? Also note: an error dialog appears after about 3 seconds after the seemingly-sucessful (because I can hear myself) test of this "Sound capture" device. The error dialog says: Failed to construct test pipeline for 'gconfaudiosrc ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=chat' Could this error message be a problem for istanbul? See my screenshot of this error dialog in the next attachment
Created attachment 103156 [details] In Gnome's "System" -> "Preferences" -> "Sound", Sound capture device tests OK, but yields an error dialog after 3 seconds. Problem for istanbul?
I've found a workaround to effectively record my desktop, and have the sound work properly. But unfortunately it wasn't using istanbul! I post this solution here which can effectively act as a feature request to the developer of istanbul to allow the end user to specify their own device (the way recordmydesktop does). It may also help the other people who posted this bug to find a solution. I installed the Ubuntu packages "recordmydesktop" and "gtk-recordmydesktop". After launching "gtk-recordmydesktop", found under "Applications" -> "Sound & Video", next I clicked on the "Advanced" button. Under the "Sound" tab, I was able to specify the "Device" to record sound from. In my case, the proper device was "hw:1,0", rather than "DEFAULT". And how did I know to use "hw:1,0"? By running the command "alsactl names" on the command line (as root), the file /etc/asound.names was generated. When I looked at the contents of that file, there were many possible device names to choose from. Based on the names listed, I narrowed down that it must be one of either "hw:1,0", "hw:1,1", "hw:1,2", or "hw:1,3". After some trial and error creating a few test videos trying different ALSA sound devices, "hw:1,0" worked!
I'm in the same shoes with Marc and Dustin under Fedora Core 8. I tested it with vanilla FC8 with Gnome and KDE. Sound recording with other application is fine.
Bug #430151 seems relevant, though maybe not a duplicate. Note that Ubuntu Hardy no longer shows the gstreamer preferences control panel in its menus, so you might need some way to open that from Istanbul preferences, or ideally you'd have some way to specify the microphone to use for Istanbul specifically.
istanbul is not under active development anymore and has not seen code changes for eight years. Its codebase has been archived: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/istanbul/commits/master See https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/screen-shot-record.html for screencast video options that are available in GNOME 3. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.