The rawrec/rawplay Home Page

rawrec and rawplay are GPL'd utilities designed to provide the user with a simple way of recording or playing raw audio data from or to their sound card under intel Linux (I havn't tested other architectures, but its written to be portable, I think). Spiffy features include:

• ability to record to or play from standard io. With this program and other handy things like the sox format converter, Ogg Vorbis lossy codec, and FLAC lossless codec, you can record or play just about any sound format you will ever come accross, with the notable exception of mp3s.
• options to pause execution, pad with silence, or jump into data files, as well as the ones you would expect which control sampling rate, sample resolution, and number of channels.
• an option to enable (amoung other things) exact reporting of what your sound card is doing. In case you are involved in speech processing research and need to know what frequency your card actually uses when you request a given frequency, for example.
• fully buffered and threaded. rawrec/rawplay use memory locking and POSIX pthread functions to provide the most consistent possible performance under load.
• ability to set the buffer fragment size, if you need extremely low latency operation.

For more details take a look at the man page.

Download

You can view the ChangeLog for the latest version.

Unfortunately, the package in debian stable is fatally broken at the moment. Don't use it.

You'll also want:

• A way to set the mixer parameters. rawrec and rawplay make no attempt to do so (it just wouldn't be right in the script/command line paradigm where rawrec operates). I recommend the program aumix for this.
• A format translator/effects gee-whizifier. sox is the answer here.
• If you are into audio compression (and who isn't?) you might want to look at Ogg Vorbis for lossy compression, or FLAC for lossless compression.

If you find a bug