Alban’s blog

For a long time, we’re using continuous recording tools to record our radio broadcasts. Many of these tools were homemade and alsa-backup is the latest project of this “serie” (after jack-backup and just-record).

alsa-backup can :

• record several channels,
• change record file according your naming policy (… without a blank),
• run as daemon,
• log into syslog,
• stop record and retry after errors

And many other features are coming This piece of Ruby code is more flexible than just-record. It uses the awesome ruby-ffi library which allows to use C libraries with few lines of ruby code.

alsa-backup is available as debian/ubuntu packages on Tryphon’s debian repository. Source files are available in GitHub alsa-backup repository.

For many years, we’re using various tools to perform long recordings : record (from xawtools), an home-patched jack-record, arecord+split, rotter, etc.

To record Esperanzah lives or Forum PHP 2007 conferences, we used our ugly (but efficient) arecord+split script. But it’s really a tool which can be shared with other teams.

So we’ve just started a dedicated tool to perform long recordings : JustRecord. These few lines of python can record in loop via alsa, run as daemon, log with syslog and execute an external script when a file is ended, etc. Tiny but usefull And many features will follow.