The Sounds of Silence

[kfallon@seneschal.com]

I am attempting to record the audio
of a radio(s) for my local emergency management agency. I have the radio
connected to the PC through the line-in jack of the sound card, and I hear
the radio tarffic coming from the left speaker. I can set the volume etc
using KMix, and this changes the volume appropriately. I'm using ALSA drivers.
I had a small amount of trouble installing, as the /usr/local/etc sub directory
was not created automatically, so I did it manually, and then reran the
install. I used setlistener to determine the proper threshold setting.
Using a setting of about 500, I could have it read "silence"
with the squelch closed, and "SOUND" with it open. I was feeling
GOOD>

I altered the listener.conf file to
match this new threshold, and altered the wav_path variable to point to
a drive with LOTS of room. I editted the correct file, as files are saved
in this directory. 
So what's the problem ? There are two.


One is, I'm always recording. Oh, wait,
I just fixed this some by choosing a value of 1000, even though I had reliable
results at 530 in setlistener.
Two, the recordings do not seem to have
anything in them. I think this is an encoding issue, as amarok shows a
bitrate of something like 14309798 kbps. That's not it ! If I transfer
it over to a windows box, real audio reports it to be corrupt.

Despite the difficulties, I'm quite
excited by the possabilities.