GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 552420
Voice encoder should be mono, not stereo
Last modified: 2016-01-10 21:19:19 UTC
This is mostly a copy of my bug report at https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/209374 : Hello, I now used gnome-sound-recorder to record a lesson, using the "Voice, Lossy (Speex audio)" encoding. The resulting file size for about 1 hour is about 20MB. It turns out that the file is encoded in stereo. I think that 99.9% of people recording speech are not interested in stereo, and most chances are that they use a mono microphone. I think that 10MB/hour would be much nicer than 20MB/hour. By the way, I think that 5MB/hour would be even nicer, if the voice quality is Ok. If it is understandable but sounds significantly worse, I would add another option - Why not have "voice, lossy, high quality" and "voice, lossy, low quality"? Voice recordings can be quite long, and it is very important to make the files as smaller as possible. Thanks, Noam
From: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-media/+bug/209374 Bruce Cowan (bruce89) wrote on 2008-12-11: #7 This was in fact fixed upstream (http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gnome-media/trunk/profiles/gnome-audio-profiles.schemas.in.in?r1=3894&r2=4072), but the GNOME bug hasn't been touched. (Jeff) Also, you can prove it is fixed by recording a short sample and opening it in Audacity. It reads the OGG file as mono recorded at 32000 hz 16-bit PCM.
gnome-media has been obsolete since the release of GNOME 3, nearly 4 years ago. Furthermore, the gnome-sound-recorder program in gnome-media has been replaced by the stand-alone, rewritten, gnome-sound-recorder program which has a different interface. I'm reassigning those bugs to the new stand-alone gnome-sound-recorder program as they might still be relevant to the new design.
I have a patch for this but I have to test it better, works apparently well in my opinion. Furthermore I can try to put the channels mode between parentheses next to the format type in the information panel, i.e: FLAC (Mono) or (Stereo).
The attached patch enables recordings in mono, but the stereo is still the default.
Created attachment 318299 [details] [review] Enables mono recordings
This problem has been fixed in the unstable development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain that newer version. Commit: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-sound-recorder/commit/?id=16dcdc059a51306fe47084d43b671811b5648e86 Awesome job, thanks!! :)