Lightest Audio Recorder - MP3, Wav or ???

[Hangard]

Just got TC up on my IBM 380z laptop.  I want to have a  computer to record live audio from my Behringer mixer board at a house of worship.

I have tried mHWaveEdit & Audacity.  Both seem too heavy for my poor hardware.  Maybe I have them configured wrong too?

Any Suggestions for a TCE that I can record from the line-in port of my sound card?

Other sound type are fine too, as long as I can convert to mp3 for file size and sharing with others who would like a copy.

Thanks

[tinypoodle]

arecord comes already included with alsa.

lame would be relatively light to encode to mp3.

[SamK]

Any Suggestions for a TCE that I can record from the line-in port of my sound card?
...as long as I can convert to mp3...

SoX might fit the bill.  It can play files, record audio, and output directly to a variety of formats including wav and mp3.

In testing it was recently running quite successfully on a venerable PC of approx 15/16 years old, so may also fit the requirement if being lightweight.

The sheer number of options can make the manual seem a little daunting at first, but for basic playing or recording to mp3 they usually boil down to using only two or three of them.
http://sox.sourceforge.net/sox.html
   

[curaga]

arecord comes already included with alsa.

lame would be relatively light to encode to mp3.

I concur, live recording to wav with arecord, editing with Audacity later and then encoding with lame/oggenc.

[SamK]

arecord comes already included with alsa.

lame would be relatively light to encode to mp3.

I concur, live recording to wav with arecord, editing with Audacity later and then encoding with lame/oggenc.

Recording a wav using arecord and then converting using LAME or oggenc is a perfectly good solution.  Indeed, SoX records the audio and also produces an mp3 via LAME.  For other than specialized transcoding requirements they are very similar.  The result is that instead of learning the commands for both arecord and LAME or oggenc only the command for SoX is needed.

The idea of recording, processing with Audacity then converting is, again, unquestionably a good one. In circumstances where the hardware is struggling to adequately record audio via either Audacity or mHWaveEdit it is possible that loading and editing a large wav file will also be too heavyweight for it.  On its website, SoX describes Audacity as "SoX's graphical soul-mate".  In cases where GUI editing is unsuitable, the CLI app offers tools to conduct the most common functions of trimming, noise reduction, normalizing, and fading all in a more lightweight form.

As is so often the case, there are multiple ways to achieve one's goal.
 

[hiro]

Or instead of arecord, you can use OSS' equivalent: ossrecord. Using it every day!

[SamK]

@Hangard
If you are more accustomed to working with GUI applications than CLI ones you might have a look at flRec:
http://www.matteolucarelli.net/flrec/index_en.htm
It provides the functions you mentioned in a lightweight GUII/SoX combination.  I have submitted a request for ity to be added to the TC repository.