How to record Games in Linux with RecordMyDesktop and PulseAudio

This tutorial is for those of you who have been struggling to record games on Linux. On the surface, this task may sound trivial, but getting started will reveal that it isn't so easy. The current online instructions that I have found are complicated and unnecessary. In my exploration, I spent about 3 hours playing around with JACK and other resources with no luck. JACK doesn't play very well with PulseAudio which comes on the more recent Ubuntu distributions. Working around it can be quite nightmarish so here I offer you an alternative.

TASK: Record Desktop Games With Game Audio.

INSTALLATION:

The applications you will need are gtk-recordmydesktop and PulseAudioDeviceChooser. In the terminal you can install with the following line:

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop padevchooser

or with the more friendly Ubuntu Software Center.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Once these two applications are installed, open the PulseAudioVolumeControl

Applications > Sound&Video > PulseAudio Volume Control

In this window, go to the Input Devices tab and show All Input Devices

Scroll down to Monitor of Internal Audio Analog Stereo and click the checkbox. This will change your default input audio what you normally hear as output. I lowered the volume a little for quality, but you may have different preferences.

(When you are finished, restore the default by clicking on Internal Audio Analog Stereo)

Now you can open gtk-RecordMyDesktop

Applications > Sound&Video > Desktop Recorder

I think that using gtk-RecordMyDesktop is pretty straight forward. Clicking on Advanced I modified the Performance as shown. Nothing special on the Sound tab. 

All that's left is to click Save As  to name you file, Select your Window, and then hit record!

That's how you record audio and video together.

Some more great Unix Lines!

for each in `ls | cut -f1 d '-'`; do mv $each /remoteFolder/; done


find E-GEOD-* \( ! -name dir -prune \)

Delete Empty Folders Recursively

I found a useful command yesterday that I intended on posting but only remembered now.

find . -type d -empty -delete

This little line works wonders when you have a lot of empty folders to delete.

Guayadeque - A linux compatible music player that I have fallen in love with

In this post I will talk about a new open source music player which I have fallen in love with. It's name, Guayadeque. Sadly I don't know how to pronounce it, nor do I know why it has such a peculiar name, but I know that this music player does what I want it to do and I highly recommended it.

Before I tell you about how great this music player is, I have to say a little thing about my music preferences and habits. First of all, I listen to a lot of Asian music including Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. For those of you who listen to this genre, I am almost positive that you have also encountered the same issue I have, that is, music filenames, and meta data are in unreadable and corrupt characters.

This problem is very annoying and itches my slight ocd for perfectly uniform and correct tags. I can't leave the track as is because I don't understand Japanese, Korean, or Chinese, and it becomes impossible for me to find it in my collection of songs. I found a great solution to this which I will post about in the future, but lets fast forward a bit and assume that I have perfectly tagged tracks.

Even if my songs are correctly tagged, a new problem arises: there are just no music players that can display and manage the correctly tagged music either! I have tried all the popular media players such as banshee, rhythmbox and amarok but all of them fail to display my tags correctly. 

This is when Guayadeque comes into play. As described from the sourceforge page:

Guayadeque is a music management program designed for all music enthusiasts. It is Full Featured Linux media player that can easily manage large collections and uses the Gstreamer media framework

This music player has a very simple and clean design, and as I eluded to before, it does a great job at displaying my music tags correctly. It does most everything a media player should do and has a host of other features such as a crossfader, last.fm audio scrobbler, and a very customizable interface (though a little buggy).

I can see that this player has lots of potential so go try it out! If you are using Ubuntu, installation is very easy. Just search for it in the Ubuntu Software Center to install it.