So Is There An Internal Mic Or Not?

[verm71]

Esperanto, my friends.

Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy to learn and politically neutral language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.

 

[renwils]

Esperanto, my friends.

Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy to learn and politically neutral language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.

I'm more of an Interlingua guy, myself.

It's a strange feeling reading a page of text from a language you've never seen before and understanding every bit of it.

 

[droneb]

Esperanto, my friends.

Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy to learn and politically neutral language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.

actually it is soo neutral it gets a lot of barriers to say simple stuff.
you could say by just one word.

 

[torpor]

!C++; // comment

 

[WizardStan]

There's a program in the firmware called 'aplay' which can play back wav etc, and 'arecord' to capture.

I'll see if I can get it to do anything.

Edit:

Not sure how it works and don't have time to figure it out right now. Maybe you guys have a better idea than me?

This *should* record the microphone to a file, but I've had issue with it on my beagleboard

arecord file.wav

This *should* echo what you say through the speakers, but again I've had some issues with arecord

arecord | aplay

I've done this a few times and never had a problem with it though

cat /dev/dsp > /dev/dsp

 

[MDave]

Audacity!

 

[bce23w]

Impossible. Ineluctable barriers to communication will always permit linguistic drift in any population larger than a village.

I think the internet is going a long way to eliminating most barriers to communication.
Perhaps we'll never be in a situation where any one person on the planet can speak to any other, but I think it's possible to at least get a majority of people to that state.
And I think it's pretty clear that it's possible to maintain a mostly consistent language within a country, which is significantly larger than a village.

Am I misinterpreting you?
EDIT2: Only just noticed the irony of this question :lol:

Of course, communication technology has permitted people to talk to whoever they want. And on the subject of Standard future-language, English is the most popular second language in the world. It's already the lingua franca (love using that phrase to not refer to French) of India, which is secretly five countries each with their own languages joined Voltron-like to conquer the universe. For that matter, China has over a dozen official languages, but they were never conquered as effectively by the British, so they only learn English if they want to get rich.

The problem is that unlike broadcast radio or television, the internet is an extremely broad and auto-fragmenting medium. So even though you could talk to almost everybody, instead you only talk to the people you really want to talk to. So now rather than communities splitting along physical barriers, you get people clumping based on age, political views, sexual fetishes, general attitude...and they each have a different standard of speech. There are boards where this style of writing would get you ostracized, where replacing "to" with "2" is expected. And of course they all have specialized words and terminology, whether in the form of "inside jokes," technical terms of their main subject of conversation, or an immense forest of emoticons. Yahoo Answers talk is just different from (most) Something Awful talk, is different from GP32X talk.

Edit: Okay, I had an idea for a Pandora commercial involving the microphone, and I put it here to try to be on topic, but it spiraled even further off the rails, so I put it in a new thread.

 

[Aninhumer]

The problem is that unlike broadcast radio or television, the internet is an extremely broad and auto-fragmenting medium. So even though you could talk to almost everybody, instead you only talk to the people you really want to talk to. So now rather than communities splitting along physical barriers, you get people clumping based on age, political views, sexual fetishes, general attitude...and they each have a different standard of speech. There are boards where this style of writing would get you ostracized, where replacing "to" with "2" is expected. And of course they all have specialized words and terminology, whether in the form of "inside jokes," technical terms of their main subject of conversation, or an immense forest of emoticons. Yahoo Answers talk is just different from (most) Something Awful talk, is different from GP32X talk.

The point is, although the actual "language" used on different forums etc. isn't the same, for the most part someone from another community can understand them.
More importantly, even if they can't initially, they are capable of communicating with that group to come to understand any special vocab or injokes relatively easily.
I see no reason why we couldn't get to a stage where everyone on the planet was capable of communicating with anyone else effectively.

 

[bce23w]

The problem is that unlike broadcast radio or television, the internet is an extremely broad and auto-fragmenting medium. So even though you could talk to almost everybody, instead you only talk to the people you really want to talk to. So now rather than communities splitting along physical barriers, you get people clumping based on age, political views, sexual fetishes, general attitude...and they each have a different standard of speech. There are boards where this style of writing would get you ostracized, where replacing "to" with "2" is expected. And of course they all have specialized words and terminology, whether in the form of "inside jokes," technical terms of their main subject of conversation, or an immense forest of emoticons. Yahoo Answers talk is just different from (most) Something Awful talk, is different from GP32X talk.

The point is, although the actual "language" used on different forums etc. isn't the same, for the most part someone from another community can understand them.
More importantly, even if they can't initially, they are capable of communicating with that group to come to understand any special vocab or injokes relatively easily.
I see no reason why we couldn't get to a stage where everyone on the planet was capable of communicating with anyone else effectively.

Well, up-thread I used a word not everyone was familiar with.

More seriously: the situation as we describe it has only been around for a few decades, and we'd need centuries to see entire new languages diverge. But moreover, the problem is that there are actually advantages to speaking a language only known by your in-group. So even if everyone knew English and only English tomorrow, people wouldn't be that upset if their English started diverging enough such that they could recognize outsiders, and establish controllable barriers to their communication, trade, marriage, etc.

 

[MDave]

There's a program in the firmware called 'aplay' which can play back wav etc, and 'arecord' to capture.

I'll see if I can get it to do anything.

Edit:

Not sure how it works and don't have time to figure it out right now. Maybe you guys have a better idea than me?

This *should* record the microphone to a file, but I've had issue with it on my beagleboard

arecord file.wav

This *should* echo what you say through the speakers, but again I've had some issues with arecord

arecord | aplay

I've done this a few times and never had a problem with it though

cat /dev/dsp > /dev/dsp

I get an error doing this:

cat /dev/dsp > /dev/dsp
cat: /dev/dsp: Input/output error

Any ideas? I'd like to test it out

 

[sebt3]

cat /dev/dsp > /dev/dsp
cat: /dev/dsp: Input/output error

Any ideas? I'd like to test it out

Defined by OSS, /dev/dsp cannot do full duplex.
So this cat, cannot work, so this is not a problem. (right Stan, this work on *some* hardware,depending on the oss drivers)

arecord | aplay

should work (no pandora here)

EDIT: fixed quote...

 

[MDave]

Doing that, I get this:

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:947snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin supports only play back stream
arecord: main:608: audio open error: Invalid argument
aplay: playback:2297: read error

hope that's helpful

 

[urjaman]

Doing that, I get this:

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:947snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin supports only play back stream
arecord: main:608: audio open error: Invalid argument
aplay: playback:2297: read error

hope that's helpful

(Sorry to interfere, but I'm curious and possibly maybe could help ;P)
Could you show what "arecord -L" prints out?

 

[MDave]

Sure, it says this:

null
Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)

 

[WizardStan]

Defined by OSS, /dev/dsp cannot do full duplex.
So this cat, cannot work, so this is not a problem. (right Stan, this work on *some* hardware,depending on the oss drivers)

Works on my BeagleBoard. It's not actually OSS, it's just a fake OSS device created by alsa which should be the exact same as on the Pandora.
The problem may be permissions. Try running it as super user? I may have set things up differently on my system. It's been quite some time now.
Maybe the alsa-oss package isn't installed. Only thing I can recommend in that case is to install it to the NAND (which I don't recommend, but is the only thing I can think of)

opkg update
opkg install alsa-oss

Doing that, I get this:

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:947snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin supports only play back stream
arecord: main:608: audio open error: Invalid argument
aplay: playback:2297: read error

hope that's helpful

Again, it works fine for me. Googling for the error, I don't understand what causes it.
Try doing it in two parts

arecord test
<talk into microphone for a few seconds, hit ctrl-C to stop>
aplay test

You may need to be super user to do that as well, maybe.

 

[urjaman]

How about with
"arecord -l" ?

I'm thinking that somebody someday somewhere wondered why aplay -L listed only null.
And that the configuration explicitly says to dmix (mix in software several playbacked things to single output) to "hw:0", which is a generic device name (not listed in -L for my pc, still accepted) for first hardware audio output.
Now arecord is for some reason trying to use this configured dmix device as a record device. Just trying to remotely figure out what the device should be for things to work.

-l, --list-devices list all soundcards and digital audio devices
-L, --list-pcms list device names

Maybe the device just doesnt have a name or something, so try "-l" (ALSA is being over my head atm).

EDIT: This attempt of using dmix as capture source could be the problem in cat /dev/dsp > /dev/dsp, too. Its only that in that case the OSS emulation interface has just to pick some valid error number to deny it because alsa denied it.

 

[MWeston]

How to enable audio recording:

- In the mixer control utility, select SELECT CONTROLS and enable 'Left Input Source' and 'Right Input Source'
- under the OPTIONS tab, set Left Input Source to MAIN MIC (for internal mic) or LINE IN when A/V cables are available
- Set Right Input Source to SUB MIC for use with four conductor headset or to LINE IN when A/V cables are available
- Under CAPTURE tab, increase the level to whatever is necessary (start at midpoint)
- Under the PLAYBACK tab, increase the INPUT BOOST to whatever is necessary (start low!)
- open a terminal window and type:

arecord -f cd -D hw:0,1 | aplay

This will play the input through the speakers. It has a good half second delay but you can still get into some interesting feedback loops if you're not careful.

- to record the input devices to a file, move to an SD card directory (strongly don't recommend writing to NAND as you know) and type:

arecord -t wav -f cd -D hw:0,1 test.wav

(call the file whatever you want and you could also type the full path to SD card here too)

- then listen to it with:

aplay test.wav

 

[MDave]

Thanks MWeston getting somewhere! I can hear what sounds like very quiet White noise, and when I press keys on my keypad I hear beeps at various volumes depending on the key pressed for some reason, but no actual sound input besides that. Can't hear my voice or anything. Did everything by the letter too!

Edit: Ok stopped the beeping by changing the right input source to none, now I just have the very quiet White noise.

 

[fusion_power]

Thanks MWeston getting somewhere! I can hear what sounds like very quiet White noise, and when I press keys on my keypad I hear beeps at various volumes depending on the key pressed for some reason, but no actual sound input besides that. Can't hear my voice or anything. Did everything by the letter too!

Edit: Ok stopped the beeping by changing the right input source to none, now I just have the very quiet White noise.

Uh, so does the mic really work or not? ^^
I thought I can simply start a programm like windows audio recorder, brabble some words and playback the whole crap. Seems like it will not that easy under the Pandora but I understood MWestons tipps.

 

[Polossatik]

so basically it would be nice to have an adapted gui that let you choose 3 things:

* internal microphone
- sets Left Input Source to MAIN MIC
- disables Right Input Source
- slider to change the mic level ( same setting as Under CAPTURE tab)

* headset microphone (those with 4 rings on the 3.5 mm jack)
- Sets Right Input Source to SUB MIC
- disables Left Input Source
- slider to change the mic level ( same setting as Under CAPTURE tab)

* Line in
- Set Right and Left Input Source to LINE IN
- slider to change the input level ( same setting as Under CAPTURE tab)