[mythtvnz] [OT] audio recording issue

[Jason Haar]

Hi there

Totally nothing to do with mythtv, but being "multimedia-philes" means
someone here may be able to answer my question. I've already submitted a
bugreport to Fedora (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=489437)
but no-one appears interested.

Basically I find that ekiga and twinkle both have TERRIBLE recording
quality (tested uner FC8,F10 and F11). When I'm talking to someone over
them, the other end always comments on how bad the line sounds. However,
skype recording sounds perfect. Doing some digging shows me that using
the command-line ALSA tool "arecord file.wav" produces a similarly
crappy recording, but "arecord -f cd file.wav" produces a much better
sounding output - the big difference is the default is 8bit vs 16bit.

It smells to me like ekiga/twinkle aren't "telling" pulseaudio (although
I think this is an old issue and affects ALSA too) to choose a higher
quality recording format and that's the root cause of my problem?

Has anyone else experienced this, and is there a workaround? My
workstation and laptop both have Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) soundcards,
and their audio-out has never been an issue - it's just the recording.
It maybe a issue with the card, but I'm not going to be able to swap out
the laptop that's for sure ;-)

Thanks

Jason