Episode: 3752
Title: HPR3752: It only took me 2 years to record using some 'new' hardware
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3752/hpr3752.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:56:27

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3752 for Tuesday the 20th of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled, it only took me two years to record using some new hardware.
It is hosted by Jezre and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is the Y and one of some new recording hardware.
Hello HPR listeners, my name is Jezre and today's episode will be about the what and why
of my new audio recording hardware, which I just so happen to be using to record this
episode of HPR.
While preparing to record this episode, I fixed a usability issue I had with XFCE and
now I'm just super jazzed, so let's get to it.
This tale begins in the late summer of 2020.
At that time I just finished building a cajon, which is a type of drum that is a wooden
rectangle that one kind of sits on and then hits with their hands, it's a hand drum.
Once the cajon was built, I tried to make an audio recording of myself playing the drum
and no matter what I used, I could simply not get a good recording of the bass sound coming
from the drum.
At the time, it seemed as though the problem was related to all of the audio capturing
devices I was using, whether it be a USB microphone or my phone's microphone, it didn't
matter.
In hindsight, really the issue was playback.
I was playing back on either a laptop that had been taken apart so many times that it only
had one working speaker or I was playing back on my phone.
Either way, the playback device could not handle the bass.
That being said, in the fall of 2020, I decided to invest in some audio recording hardware
from Sweetwater, which is a seller online of audio recording hardware for musicians and
bands and whatnot.
The order included an E604 bass drum microphone, an AT2035 diaphragm condenser mic for recording
voice, which is what I'm recording with right now.
And a Personas Audio Box USB 96 little mixer thing, as plugs into my hardware by USB.
It's powered by USB.
It has two microphone input or microphone or instrument inputs.
And it has output in the back for MIDI and headphones and simply line out left and right.
On the front are some dials to adjust the two inputs.
There is no software support for this device as far as mixing goes, which means all of the
mixing must be done on the hardware and I'm recording this in Audacity and Audacity has
no software control of the audio level.
There is no Linux support from Personas for this USB mixing device.
However, the mixing device does show up as a standard USB audio device.
With kernel support, I believe starting in version 5 point something.
Once the hardware arrived, it was time to do some testing.
At first I tried to use the hardware with my Toshiba laptop, which is fairly large, only
has one external speaker, a battery that doesn't hold a charge.
And most importantly, the laptop in question has an incredibly loud fan.
And if I was going to do any audio recording, I would want to use a computer that has
either no fan or an incredibly quiet fan.
So it was time to find something else to use.
Fortunately, I had a fanless device lying around that I could try out.
This device was a EEPC 702 that has no fan, it was a 32 bit machine, and it was running
Debian at the time.
Unfortunately, the operating system simply did not recognize the audio box USB 96 USB mixer.
So I then decided that it was time to buy a new laptop type device that would be light
weight, fanless, inexpensive, and could do what I needed to do.
In that regard, I purchased a PineBook Pro.
The USB mixer worked just fine with the PineBook Pro, so I was very happy.
However, I still had the same playback issue.
I could not hear bass in anything I recorded.
And as I said previously, it had nothing to do with the recording and always had to do
with the playback device.
The PineBook Pro speakers simply can't handle the bass that I'm recording with the bass
microphone on the bass hole of the cajon that I created.
Being disheartened by what I thought was an issue with the recording hardware, I packed
up the recording hardware into a little box and put it onto a shelf.
However, I still continued to play with the PineBook Pro and tried to improve it to the
point where I would want to use it far more often than I had been using it.
Originally the PineBook Pro was purchased very specifically for this audio recording project,
but because it is a Linux-based computer, I wanted to use it for more of the things I
use Linux-based computers for.
In order to do that, I need Firefox and I need the terminal.
What I don't need is a very robust feature-rich desktop environment.
I like a nice, small, lightweight, quick desktop environment.
If I have to have a desktop environment at all, the setup that came with Manjaro on
this PineBook Pro was not my liking, so I switched to the XFCE desktop environment.
Also not necessarily to my liking.
What I missed the most and what I couldn't do was press Alt-space and have that start
a application-finder-slash-launcher.
That is my primary way of starting a application on any Linux computer I have other than my
phone.
I press Alt-space, there's a text field shows up on the screen somewhere, I start typing
the name of an app.
When it is found, I can hit Enter and that app starts.
That is what I want.
And that is what I managed to do today.
In XFCE, one must first go to the Window Manager settings and disable the setting that consumes
Alt-space.
Then one would go into the keyboard shortcut settings and create a new keyboard shortcut
for whichever app launcher one prefers and bind that to the Alt-space keyboard shortcut.
Hot digity, I did that today and I was unbelievably happy.
The application I use for launching the applications is Treb, I just call it Treb, it's really
just a Python script with some GTK bindings in there and it works wonderfully for me.
Now you might be thinking, well, hold on a second there, Bob.
If the audio recording hardware is sitting on a shelf collecting dust, why is it that
you brought the audio recording hardware back out connected it to a laptop with some
software and did some recording?
Well, the simple answer to that question is, I figured out the playback issue so that
I can now actually hear the bass that's getting recorded and the easiest way for me to do
that is by plugging into the PineBook Pro, my USB headset which has decent speakers and I set
all the audio playback to go through that headset.
According to LSUSB, the headset is a Logitech Clear Chat Comfort USB headset and it has a built-in
mic which I've previously used for audio recording but this audio recording is very specifically going
through the Personas Audio Box USB 96 with a condenser microphone.
Unlike every other audio recording setup I've used for HPR, this setup creates a very
clean project and by clean I mean there does not appear to be any need for me to use audacity
to do background noise removal.
There is no background noise and for that I am incredibly happy and on that note I guess
that's about it. Take care HPR!
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording broadcast you can click on our contribute link to find out how easy
it really is. Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an onsthost.com, the Internet Archive
and our Sync.net. On this audio I stated today's show is released under Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.
