More on Zaurus sound

I’ve been running Openzaurus 3.5.4 for some
time now. It’s really good for reading books — they improved
the fonts a lot. I haven’t had time to check out sound, but
because of having previously
worked on it, someone who did wrote me his results.

From: Lee Phillips

Subject: Sound on Zaurus 5500

Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:03:30 -0400

Hi,

Thanks partly to your website and some others that you linked to,
I managed to get sound recording and playback working on my Z with
OZ 3.5.4.

Mainly through ignorant but systematic trial and error I came up
with these procedures:

Record (through left headphone) with

cat /dev/dsp1 > s.raw

Playing this back with cat s.raw > /dev/dsp gives slowed down sound, as
you know.

But if you install sox on the Z (no problems using ipkg from the command
line; as you’ve probably discovered the GUI package manager is useless) you
can convert to another raw sound file with

sox -V -b -s -r 8000 -c 2 s.raw -b -s -c 1 so.raw speed 1.333 avg -r

and this sounds normal when catted through /dev/dsp1.

But we want a portable sound file. Sox won’t encode to mp3 on the 5500,
but it will make an au (Sun format) file, which is pretty widely useable
(Quicktime plays it on my Mac):

sox -V -b -s -r 8000 -c 2 s.raw -c 1 -v 4 so.au speed 2.6666 avg -r

You might find values for speed and volume (-v 4) that work better,
again this is trial and error and sounds ok for speech.