Ubuntu: Record Your Desktop

For the longest time, I had been having problems using recordMyDesktop, which is actually a really nice desktop recording utility for Linux: Ubuntu in particular. The gtk-recordMyDesktop package provides a really nice front-end for the internals of the screen recorder.

Now, I've had far too many problems to list when using recordMyDesktop, so many, in-fact, that it basically made it impossible for me to do any real recordings. On Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron (my first Ubuntu distro), recordMyDesktop was sketchy at best, and would basically fail all of the time. I could record reliably for about 10 seconds about 50% of the time, without audio. Luckily, it seems pretty reliable on my new Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty 64bit distribution.

I recently bought a Plantronics USB headset by which to do my screencasts, and that has given me no end of troubles, until now. When I'd record my desktop in the past, the audio would be horrible, all jumbled and super fast: compacted into the first few seconds of the recording. Then I realized how stupid of a mistake I overlooked. I needed to set the kHz to the right setting. By default, recordMyDesktop uses 22100 Hz, which gave me horrible results. 44100 Hz gave me crappy audio too, but only after I punched in '48000' Hz did I get awesome audio.

This mistake of mine was especially hilarious because I used to do audio recording, production, and mastering all of the time using my Windows XP machine and Cakewalk's Sonar 6. To this day, I still use Sonar from time to time, as it's basically the best DAW available anywhere. (My main computer is kind of screwed up right now, but that's another story.)

Basically, the point is this: if you're recording from an audio source and getting jumbled, crazy-sounding audio, try different Hz/kHz settings and different bit-rates. This should go without saying, but hey, we all make mistakes sometime.