What I was trying to do was this:
Play a song or movie through one of the players available like: xine, xmms etc.
Record this audio output.

There is an application called KRec which is bundled with KDE, but this app can only record an aRTs ouput, not ALSA’s. Besides, the output format is not WAV.

When I google’d for other alternatives, I came across a command line utility called
‘arecord’ which comes with ALSA.

I checked it out and it was installed in my system.
An example command to record soundcard ouput was specified in the man pages and I tried it:

arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav -D copy foobar.wav

This command records a 10 second audio clip of CD quality from the device ‘copy’
and the output is in ‘wav’ format.
But, the command failed saying that it could not find ‘copy’.

According to the manual the ‘copy’ device has to be specified in the user’s .asoundrc file.
As I did not find the file in my home folder, I created it and named it  ’.asoundrc’ in my home folder and copied the following lines into it:

pcm.copy {
type plug
slave {
pcm hw
}
route_policy copy
}

Now when I tried the previous command again, it worked!
But unfortunately, when I tried to play the wav file back all I heard was static.

Then I saw that the ‘arecord’ man pages referred to the command ‘amixer’.

After a bit of digging I issued the following command:

amixer contents

This command displays all controls applicable to the sound card.

The ouput of this command listed a control called ‘Capture Source’ which was currently set to 3 which meant it was recording from the external microphone.

I set the capture source to 4 which meant ‘MIX’:

amixer cset numid=27,iface=MIXER,name='Capture Source" 4
(The ‘numid’ might be different in your system, use ‘amixer controls’  to find the exact name)

Then I tried the old arecord command:

arecord -d 10 -f cd -t wav -D copy foobar.wav

After all that waiting, it felt amazing to hear something recorded when I played back foober.wav. But the recording was horrible with a lot of static, so I dug up the man pages again and issued the following command:

arecord -d 10 -c 2 -f S16_LE -r 44100 -t wav -D copy foobar.wav

This is exactly same as the earlier command (‘-f cd’internally is actually ‘-c2 -r44100 -f S16_LE’) but now the audio quality was perfect with no noise as far as I could hear.

The output was a bulky file which blew up to 1.7 MB for 10 seconds which is understandable given that the output is wav format.

If you have lame installed on your system you can use the following command to convert wav to MP3.
lame -h foober.wav foobar.mp3
Tips:

Do not set you player volume to max while recording. This will introduce noise into your recording. Set it halfway through, say between 50%-60%.

If you do not know how long a recording will take (For example a live interview on LQRadio), set the -d option of ‘arecord’ command to an arbitrarily large value like 1400.
This way when you have reached the end of the recording you can just ctrl-c.

Good bye and happy recording.

“Hello. I am Dr. R. I am the chief here. What is your name?”.

I could not believe my ears. Darn, I didn’t even know, I had ears.

“I am A.”, I said in a shrill voice.

Now I couldn’t believe my tongue.

“Mr A, how do you feel now?” asked Dr. R.

“I thought I was deaf and mute, but it seems I am not. I am still blind though.”

“We will soon fix that.” replied R.

August 3.

I have been quite busy these days. I have found out about the crash, the Daylight’s crew and where I am lying right now.

It seems, I did survive the crash, but just about. The rest of the crew though were plain unlucky. The unit in SD12 where we crashed, whisked me away to the nearest hospital and I had been in a coma for a couple of months.

But all is not bad, the chief says, I will be able to see in about a month. So, I have something to look forward to (literally), but in the meantime I am reduced to lie here and listen.

The first thing I noticed was that there was a beep every now and then. The warden told me that it was a clock which beeped every hour. Occassionally, I would hear a door opening somewhere, people talking, a faint din of computers and sometimes a laugh. The wierd thing was how the chief talked to me. He would come into the room followed by a group of people at about the tenth beep of the day, which I calculated to be around 3 PM. He would then ask questions, as if they were addressed to a baby, pausing after each word and repeating the whole question in case of a mistake. While we talked, the group listened on, recording the conversation, I guess.

December 12.

The chief came in early today, at the 6th beep to be exact. And he came in alone. I had got to know him quite well and of late he had dropped his wierd accent and started talking to me normally. Today, he had an excited air about him.

“You seem to be stirred today, chief”, I asked.

“Yup.”, he replied.

“Well, what it is about?”

“How would you like to have a pair of eyes, A?”

“I would very much like them”, I said excitedly.

“Then I will give it to you. Tomorrow.” he said and walked away.

December 14.

“Open your eyes.” The chief said.

I obeyed and tried to open. Initially, the light in the room seemed to burn my eyes, but I persisted and in time found a blurry image of the room before me. I tried moving my eyes all around and found the chief and his assistants eagerly gaping at me. I tried looking at the my constant companion, the beeping clock, but it was out of my range.

“Everything is blurred and I cannot move my head.” I said.

“It will improve”, replied the chief.

 December 18.

As my vision got clearer, I began taking in the room and its contents. It was drenched with little blinking lights made by all the computers. I couldn’t see my body, because of the angle I was lying in, but I could see a large part of the cieling.

The room was completely sealed, which meant there was no natural light. The ceiling was made up of a lot of lamps. I knew about these huge lamps, they were shiny when turned off but when switched on gave a flourascent glow which was pleasant to the eye.

That gave me an idea. If you switched off the lamp closest and directly ahead of me and leave the other lamps on, I could look at the whole room reflected on the lamp, and thus my beeping clock. It was a tempting thought, and I stuck to it.

December 19.

At exactly the third beep of the day, S, the chief’s assistant came in to check me up. S was a good man and a friend of mine. I had talked to him one day, quite suddenly, and he was startled a good deal. But later, he got used to me and we had become quite good friends.

But, today I was silent when he took my readings. About an hour later, when he was turning to leave, I called to him.

“S, How are you?”

“I am good. How are you doing yourself?.”

“Great. S, can you turn off the lamp over there, in front of me. They are hurting my eyes.”

“Sure. See you later.”

I waited impatiently for S to switch off the light. When he did, I saw the part of the room behind me clearly reflected in the lamp. I frantically searched for my beeping clock but could not find it. I had myself heard it three times since this morning, so it had to be somewhere behind me.

Just about then, the clock beeped again and I moved my eyes frantically trying to locate it. I found it at last.

It wasn’t a clock at all !!! I mean, why would a clock be so huge, with so many wires going into it and coming out of it.

“Oh..”, I said to myself,”that is a computer.”

“Then where are those wires going.”

I carefully followed path of the wires. They connected to other computers and the wires coming out of all the computers were connected to a black box.

That is when I saw myself.

I was numb.

I saw myself floating there, in a glass box. Millions of wires coming out of my brainstem. I closed my cameras and squeezed them.

Let me try to remember how I got here. Ah, yes, the crash, of course.

March 10. The Crash.
The day was ordinary, what I mean by day is of course the 12 hours between 6 and 6. Thats how we marked day. Not by sunlight, we did not have that luxury aboard the Daylight. How ironic, no daylight aboard the Daylight. We had reached a point where the sun became but a small blip on the navigation panel, and invisible if you peeked out of your portal window.

“Report at +07 01 12 March 10 2054.
 Mean distance = 2054 AUs from Sun and 1542 AUs from SD12.
 Computing data for LS jump. Estimated computation time 6 hours.
 Critcality attainment at +13 50 00.
 Next LS jump at +14 00 00.”

said the ship’s computer as I read it out aloud. After another jump we should be close to SD12 and then would be time to wake up the crew from their sleep.

March 10 +13 50 00.
The ship wizzed and suddenly felt alive. No matter how many times I had experienced this, it never failed to give me the thrills. It was preparing for another jump.

“Current co-ordinates 09139764301244977321500″
 Destination co-ordiantes 1206647896355214556877
 Error percentage 1E-96 +/- 1E-102″
I looked at the screen, smiled at the chances of error. I closed my eyes. There was a zip.
When I opened them, the smile vanished. Where was SD12? A second later, the planet came out suddenly in my view, and ground was approaching fast. I was numb at the sight. “This cannot be” I said to myself. The last few things I heard were the bellow of the ships fins trying to slow down the descent and the bang that came in the end.

June 20.
It is horrible to lie on a bed when you can think, but cannot see, hear or talk. You tend to believe that the world is a black box with you trapped inside, nowhere to go because, awkwardly there is no place to go. You think about things until you exhaust everything there is to think about. You wait with bated breath, to hear the most faintest sound not your own.
But I haven’t heard so much as a whisper.

June 24
Silence.

June 25.
Silence.

June 26.
Silence. I think I am dead.

June 27
A whir. I am not dead.

July 1.
Noise.

July 3.
More noise. Unbearable noise, I wish I could go back to silence.

July 4.
Silence.

..To Be Continued..

Guest: How kind of you to let me come.

Host: It was nothing.

G: I really must thank you.

H: You musn’t.

G: Yes. Thanks indeed.

H: My pleasure.

G: I mean, I am awfully obliged.

H: But, I thought you liked it.

G: No. I don’t mean it was awful of you !!

H: That is a relief.

G: Though, I do admit, I am a trifle uneasy.

H: What can I do to ease you?

G: That man over there hasn’t stopped ogling at me since I arrived.

H: That’s my husband!!

G: I feel like a mannequin in a bazaar.

H: He is not looking at you.

G: oh, why did you invite me here you dim nitwit.

H: What?!!

G: Really it was cruel of you to let me come.

H: Shall I lead you to the door.