Tips And Tricks

• Recording sound output of a program:

1. Many drivers offer a 'vol' mixer control. If this is used as a recording source, than the current sound output will be recorded. Note that this is the mixed total of all sound played, not of a single program.

   ossrecord -ivol blah.wav

2. vmix loopback driver can record the output of a program. Set vmix_numloops to 1 (or more) in vmix.conf, and make the program output to the newly created /dev/oss/vmix0/loop0 device. Then record from that device. e.g.

   ossplay test.wav -d/dev/oss/vmix0/loop0 &

   ossrecord test2.wav -d/dev/oss/vmix0/loop0

3. OSS wrappers can be used to record the output of a program. vsound is one such wrapper. (vsound doesn't handle output to /dev/oss/* device nodes, but all OSS-supporting programs are/can be easily made to output to /dev/dsp).

   vsound ossplay test.wav

• Changing the default sound output used for /dev/dsp

1. $OSSLIBDIR/etc/installed_drivers influences the order of sound cards set by ossdetect. By removing other devices or moving the desired sound card to the first place, followed by running 'ossdetect -v', the default device can be modified.

   The root directory $OSSLIBDIR can be found by checking /etc/oss.conf

2. Relink /dev/dsp to the desired /dev/oss/.../ device. If OSS insists on recreating /dev/dsp, simply add the appropriate linking command to $OSSLIBDIR/soundon.user.