Feature Request: Direct microphone recording

[scrawl]

It would be great if OpenShot had a function to directly record voice from the microphone. That would add to https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/433939 . Then we can do a screencast and directly compose it.

[Olivier Girard (eolinwen)]

Thanks for the feature requests. I'll tag this as 'wishlist' so it
doesn't get lost in the bug tracker.It's a good idea.

[moimael (moimael)]

It's not very difficult to implement but i wanted to know what solution is the best ?

We can use directly the command line utility rec -> simple, no dependency,....
We can use gstreamer (but ad a lot of dependency, but if we use it for video acquisition it is the right choice)

Or some cross platform library like pymedia or swmixer...

What is the best ?

[Andy Finch (fincha)]

I don't think pymedia or swmixer are in the repositories. There is also the built in python ossaudiodev module, which could probably do the job without adding another dependency.

[moimael (moimael)]

But it seems to be only for OSS which is not used anymore, now we use ALSA in conbination (sometimes) with pulseaudio.

[Andy Finch (fincha)]

There is also python-alsaaudio, which is in the repositories, at least for Karmic & Lucid (http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/python-alsaaudio).

The cmd line rec utility maybe all that is required, it depends on what features we want to add - i.e. python-alsaaudio can select different cards to capture from.

[GMaq (info-bandshed)]

Hi,

I see this is already in progress which is awesome...

If I may make a suggestion, I realize pulseaudio is everywhere and very popular in big distros however it is not universally always the best audio option. If whatever you come up with could allow choosing ALSA or pulseaudio or even JACK now that melt/mlt can utilize JACK Transport that would be a real benefit to users.

I realize it's easy to ask from the outside without knowing what it entails on the coding side of things, but pretty much all distros use ALSA but all don't use Pulseaudio. Just a suggestion FWIW :-)

[Andy Finch (fincha)]

The plan is for something quite basic - sox can be used to record, and will use the default sound device as the input source, so I don't think it will matter whether ALSA or Pulseaudio is being used.

[Andy Finch (fincha)]

@Glen, seeing as you mention JACK in MLT, do you know of any documentation for it?

[GMaq (info-bandshed)]

Hi Andy,

Unfortunately I don't know of any actual API docs, however I see it in the release announcement here:
http://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=96039&id=302099

Apparently melt -jack enables it. Also MLT 0.7.4 in Kdenlive automatically exposes all LADSPA Plugins present on the system as Audio Effects, not sure if this is of interest to you currently or not, it is working though. Of course the mlt mailing list is probably the best bet for more detailed info...

-GLEN