[Alsa-user] Recording a playback stream

[Edward C. <edw...@gm...>]

Is there any plugin or asoundrc trick that I can use to record a playback
stream?

My situation is this: I'm using a USB headset with Skype 1.4 and I'd like to
record the conversation, but Skype provides no way of doing this. The USB
audio device doesn't provide any "mix" input that I can record, the only
capture stream it appears to produce is the one from the microphone (which I
_can_ record during a Skype conference, but it's not all that useful without
the other voices). I have managed to record the two streams directly to raw
files using the File plugin, but this is less than ideal because they then
need to be manually aligned, and it appears that if Skype is interrupted and
re-opens the sound device, it will start overwriting the output files from
the start.

What I'd like is to be able to set Audacity recording from a virtual "mix"
device, then start the Skype conference and have Audacity record both my
voice, and the voices of the others in the conference.

I'm using ALSA 1.0.14 in Debian (Lenny) for i386.

Thanks,
Ed.