How to use Audio Recorder to record tracks in separate files?

I have installed Audio Recorder to record sounds played by my computer.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:osmoma/audio-recorder
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audio-recorder

I want it to create separate files after several seconds of silence, like for tracks.

It has a lot of possible settings especially by activating the "timer".

But, under my current settings, stopping after silence ("stop if silence") and restarting recording if sound is played ("start if sound") would continue recording in the same file.

I want it to continue in a new file each time. That would increase the probability of recording separate audio parts/songs as separate files.

I have uploaded here the timer syntax help (also available after installation clicking the button beside timer options).

Solution 1:

First of all: the "Add" option beside the name of the output file must not be checked in order to avoid potential new files being added to the previous one. (I guess this is the default setting in fact!!)

As for the settings in the Timer, it is a matter of trial an error, and changes should be made from case to case.

A good start would be adding in any case 'start if sound', so that a new file should be created when sound starts; but in order to have a new file, first the recorder must be made to stop when there is no sound. 'stop if silence' is not a good option, as it creates a lot of small useless files; a better option is 'stop if silence 1 sec.'. 'stop if silence 0.5 sec' may also be a good option. (This should be enough for the stated purpose. Using audio threshold timer commands seems to me more complicated.)

Changing volume level during recording is a bad idea.

Solution 2:

I just went through this (my daughter had a requirement...well, ok, demand to populate her mp3 player).

I installed audio-recorder on both her laptop and my server. I like the server option better since I have more space there and no speakers hooked up. The laptop makes noise.

I ended up using the following for timing (this took a bit of trial and error).

start if sound 1s 0.5
stop if sound 2s 0.2

I'm using Jango as my input stream. On the laptop this works great, on the server I end up (for reasons I can't explain) with a lot of tiny files.

So I wrote a script to clean up:

cat cleanup.sh
find *.mp3 -size -100k | xargs rm -rf

After they are recorded, I use Picard to label and categorize them. I'm very pleased, and my daughter is happy-ish.