<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-15" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hi Tanu, thanks, appreciate your explanation of sinks and sources. 1) I'm presuming that I cannot use the Simple API for stereo mixing; only the Async API should be used? 2) is there any app (e.g gnome-sound-recorder) that uses PA for recording sound? I can look at the source and learn. thanks again L.K Tanu Kaskinen wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:1331193196.2373.24.camel@laptop" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 21:39 -0800, Laxmikant Rashinkar wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Hi, I'm brand new to pulseaudio. I want to dive right in and write a cmd line application that records whatever is being played on the speaker to a disk file (aka stereo mix). Can someone give me a general idea of how to go about doing this? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> Output devices are represented by "sinks" and input devices are represented by "sources" in Pulseaudio. Assuming that a sound card supports both output and input, it usually shows up as one sink and one source. In addition to that, every sink has an automatically generated "monitor source" that can be used just like any other source. So, whatever you play to a sink, you can record it from its monitor source. Sinks and sources have names. The easiest way to recognize a monitor source is looking at its name: the monitor source names always end with ".monitor". For example, "pactl list sinks | grep Name: ; pa list sources | grep Name:" prints this on my system: Name: alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo Name: alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo.monitor Name: alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo The first one is the sink name for my laptop's internal sound card's output, the second one is the monitor source for that sink, and the third one is the source name for the internal sound card's input. I hope the concept of monitor sources is now clear. You'll just have to make an application that records from the monitor sources. I don't know how you'll want to handle the case where the system has multiple sound cards. </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>