Ardour, Alsa, Jack: Record soundcard output

[^rooker]

There are about several million ways found on the internet how you can record the output of your soundcard on Linux.
However, my quest for doing this seems to be haunted - so I gave up and chose to use the "one and dirty way I know from Windows": record "what u hear" on my SBLive.

Here's how I set up my system:
1) open "alsamixer".
2) Select "capture".
(by pressing "Tab" to switch between "playback", "capture" and "all")
3) Look for "Wave" as capture device and hit the space bar.

Now you should see "LR CAPTUR" (in red letters) below the Wave volume meter:

L R
CAPTUR

That's it. Now you can record everything you "hear" on your soundcard. I've seen tutorials that mention that you have to select "mix" as input source, but it seems to make no difference on my system. I tried with both "Line" and "Mix" as input sources and it works.

After I've finished my recording, I hopefully have time to find a better solution - especially for recording from Wine. Wine's jack support is currently highly unstable and thus I preferred to go over alsa.

[^rooker]

Unfortunately the link between alsa and jack, libasound_module_pcm_jack.so, is *not* in "libasound2-plugins" package anymore due to build dependency problems launchpad bug #84900

So I had to build it myself, using the instructions from Adrián Pérez on planet.igalia.com

Here's a short excerpt of compiling libasound's JACK plugin module:
1) Install packages:
* libjack-dev
* libasound2-dev
* jackd
* make

2) Manually build the ALSA plugins package:
Grab alsa-plugins-X.Y.Z.tar.bz2 from ALSA's main page

3) compile the plugins:

Code: Select all

cd alsa-plugins-*
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
cp jack/.libs/libasound_module_pcm_jack.so /usr/lib/alsa-lib

I prefered doing
"sudo checkinstall cp jack/.libs/libasound_module_pcm_jack.so /usr/lib/alsa-lib"