The EeePC and a Samson C01U USB microphone

I thought about using my 3E for linguistic fieldwork: it's small, it's a full computer and it has a webcam and a microphone. No need for an external recording facility anymore. Unfortunately the built-in microphone is of poor quality and not suitable for doing decent fieldwork recordings. As I had a Samson C01U lying around (bought it for my Mac thinking of becoming a musician ;-)) I gave it a try. And it works, quite out of the box. It just doesn't appear in the 3E's mixer, but that's not a problem, just start the shipped recording software (krecord) in the terminal:


1) Press "Crtl-T" to start a terminal.

2a) To set the recording level you should use the alsamixer, enter: "alsamixer -c 1". Press "F4" to see the input level, then "UP" and "DOWN" will alter the level. I had to set the level pretty high to gain 17.00. Press "ESC" to quit the mixer.

2b) Enter "krecord -d /dev/dsp1".


I edit the recordings with Audacity afterwards. Unfortunately it is not possible to record to Audacity directly due to a bug in version 1.2 of Audacity. I always record mono, as of another problem with the recording levels under Linux.


And finally here's how to install Audacity on your 3E. Have fun!