When recording the feathercasts I’ve been using a program under windows, but ideally I’d like to be able to record under Ubuntu as well. Looking around a solution using the JACK server seems as though it should work, but it requires oss2jack for Skype is still stuck using OSS for it’s sound when the rest of the world has moved onto using ALSA. Installing oss2jack was no mean feat though as it’s not an official package for Ubuntu.
This is what I eventually had to do (from memory and some steps may be missing)!
Install the following packages from synaptic
- libsamplerate0
- libsamplerate0-dev
- libjack0.100.0
- libjack0.100.0-dev
Then grab the latest fusd and oss2jack packages. Rather than follow the links I found on various webpages I eventually just visited the main page at http://fort.xdas.com/~kor/oss2jack/ and then fetched the latest packages as listed there. Extracting and building these worked fine.
I loaded the fusd module using modprobe kfusd and checked that /dev/fusd was created and had the 2 expected nodes.
After a reboot sound worked fine, but jackd and oss2jack didn’t startup. The breezy package has some scripts that permit this, but these weren’t usable on the dapper system.
Following some advice I found I rmeoved the oss modules from the kernel.
sudo rmmod snd_pcm_oss
sudo rmmod snd-mixer-oss
After removing these there were no /dev/dsp devices listed. Starting jackd and oss2jack replaced the /dev/dsp device.
jackd -R -d alsa -d hw:0 -r 48000 &
oss2jack &
Once checking that I once more had a /dev/dsp node I started skype. Calling the echo test worked and I had sound – although it was a little choppy.
For testing the JACK documentation talked about using ecasound, so I installed the following packages via synaptic.
- ecasound
- ladspa-sdk
This proved that the sound was working and wasn’t choppy, so the problem had to be Skype. I tried running xmms and then calling the echo test service again using Skype – the result was both applications producing audio with no errors reported by Skype. This seems to show that it’s all working. Now I just need to try and get the Skype quality improved and figure out how to record it!