Ripping protected audio

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 06:43:29PM -0400, Sy Ali wrote:
> I've played with audacity and ecasound and both seem to be recording
> really terrible audio.
> 
> Audacity is frustrating to work with, and I see a lot of different
> audio options which don't seem to change anything.

I can't figure out what you are trying to do.

> I'm presently unable to get JACK to do much.
> 
> Is there one consistent guide out there which helps with such a topic?
> 
> I'd be willing to get/burn/boot from a live distro to use its tools,
> if that's an option.
> 
> 
> audacity:
> 
> I changed my input/output settings to "ALSA (default)"
> 
> ecasound:
> 
> ecasound -i:/dev/dsp -o somefile.wav

You could just use 'arecord' to record from any alsa device.

> Does this work with ALSA?  Are there recommended quality settings?
> 
> I am fairly familiar with some other things I ought to work with -
> like kmix settings.  I played and played and with what I think are the
> correct settings, my recordings still sound terrible.
> 
> In particular, there's a band who have a page on myspace, and they
> have audio up there which isn't released yet (because they're
> unsigned).  I want to be able to grab/archive it.  This is one of
> those "I'd buy it if I could" moments.

So is it playing through a flash plugin or something?

On many sounds cards alsa can record the output.  Run alsamixer, hit tab
to move to capture view, then look for an entry named 'mix'.  If you hit
space on that one you should set the capture input to that which should
let whatever is recording from your sound card record what the sound
card is outputting.  This uses an analog loopback on the card to do the
work, so it won't be that great quality.

For high quality you want something like an sb live or related, where
the capture choices include things like 'wave' which simply lets you
record any pcm output that goes through the chip before it is converted
to analog.  Not sure any sound card that doesn't use a fancy DSP can do
that though.

It should also be possible to setup copy devices in alsa using asoundrc
although how one would do that I don't know, since I just use an sb live
which doesn't require doing any software mixing or copying or any of the
other stuff people use asoundrc for.

--
Len Sorensen
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