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Happy Easter everyone. Another weekend and another Linux article. In this article, I go through how to record podcasts with FFmpeg.
The first thing to pass is the input file format with -f. For audio there are three options:
oss– legacy Linux audio driver (not used anymore)alsa– newer audio driverpulse– most recent driver that’s used in modern Linux distributions
After that, you need to set the input using -i. That’s the tricky part because depends on your driver, the parameter would be different.
Configure Alsa
For alsa you need to pass something like this,
$ ffmpeg -f alsa -i hw:0,1Where 0 points to the card number and 1 points to device number.
But how to get it? You can use arecord -l. Since the number may change with each reboot, it’s better to pass the device name instead.
To get device name run arecord -L and the pass the value you want in front of -i.
Configure Pulse
For pulse audio, you need to get the device number using pacmd list-sources and then set the index in front of -it parameter.
$ ffmpeg -f pulse -i 2Channel setting
You can set the channel with -ac parameter. For stereo use 2 for mono 1.
$ ffmpeg -f pulse -i 2 -ac 2Codec setting
To set the audio codec use either -c:a or -acodec. My recommendation is to use libmp3lame. Of course, you are not limited to that. There are many options like flac, aac, etc.
$ ffmpeg -f pulse -i 2 -ac 2 -acodec libmp3lameBitrate setting
Finally set the bitrate with -ab parameter. For very high-quality audio use -ab 320k. For standard use either -ab 128k or -ab 160k.
$ ffmpeg -f pulse -i 2 -ac 2 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 320k out.mp3That’s all you need to record podcasts using FFmpeg. Hope you enjoy it.
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