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Welcome to the Sarek Home Page! |
| The quick description |
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Sarek: Sound recording for Mac OSX.
Sarek is a sound recording application that lets you do many things:
Here is where you can download Sarek: |
| Recent Updates |
| Version 0.02, 15 May 2005 |
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| Version 0.01, 6 Sep 2004 |
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| What does it look like? |
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Each open Sarek document gives you a window like this that lets you set up a recording session.
Audio settings default to whatever you used last. If you saved a document then Sarek will
reconfigure your sound hardware for you when it starts recording.
The two checkboxes are for automated recording. If you have Auto-start set, then when you open the document, Sarek will begin recording (Note: If you hold down the Option key while Sarek is launching, recording will NOT begin, even if this box is checked). If you check the other box, Sarek will automatically stop at the specified time. I like to start recordings at 6 minutes after the hour so I can miss all the local "news" and hear just what I want to hear -- that's why the default is to record for 54 minutes. Or, if you tell it to record until 60 minutes after the hour, then you can start your recordings any time you want and it will quit at the top of the hour. Sarek will record to a file that has the same name as the Sarek document (or Untitled), plus the appropriate extension. Sarek will also make strftime() substitutions into appropriate fields in the file name. E.g., if your Sarek document is named "Joe Blow-%a-%H00", and you launch Sarek with it at 9:06 on a Tuesday, it will record to a file named "Joe Blow-Tue-0900.mp3" or .WAV, as the case may be. This way, you can use one document to record the same show and let iCal launch you at the correct time. For more information on strftime, I'd suggest a google search. To set the location of the output file, click the "Folder..." button and you can select the folder into which your file will be saved. Encoding options are currently MP3 or WAV. Sarek will append the correct file extension for the format you selected. If you select the Listen checkbox, Sarek will also send the sound you are recording to your sound output. If you select the "Stream to Port" checkbox, Sarek will also begin streaming the encoded sound to the port you have entered. Please see below for a description of Sarek streaming. |
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Sarek also lets you just play the recording sound through the Mac to the speakers. This is handy
if you have something already set up but you just want to listen live without having to move
your wires around.
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Sarek also lets you play what is being recorded to a stream. This stream can be listend to
using iTunes 4.6 or later. Sarek creates a TCP stream so you can tunnel it through SSH.
This is especially cool if you work at a place behind a firewall and have trouble listening
to standard streams.
Sarek streams the encoded sound to the port you have entered. For example, if your machine called "foo" is running Sarek and streaming to port 7777, then from another machine, you can tell iTunes to open the URL http://foo:7777 and you should be able to hear it. NOTE: I don't know how robust this is or how many clients it will handle. If you're setting up an Internet radio station, Sarek isn't what you want to use. ALSO NOTE: This will stream whatever format you're encoding to. It's better not to stream the WAV format. |
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Sarek can record until you tell it to stop, or it can record for a while. The two options
are to record for some number of minutes, or to record until a specified time after the
hour. I like to split my recordings up into one-hour chunks, so if I tell iCal to launch
my Sarek document at 6 minutes after the hour, and my Sarek document says to record until
60 minutes after the hour, I get the whole show. If for some reason I have to restart
Sarek, I can launch the same document manually and it will still shut off at the top of
the hour instead of it still recording while my next document gets launched by iCal.
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Sarek lets you determine what channels to record. Stereo and Mono are obvious. Left and
Right Only let you record from only one channel and Sarek automatically copies
the one channel over to the other. This way if you don't have a mono-to-stereo cable for
your cheap radio, you won't ever need one.
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| FaIAQs (Frequently and Infrequently Asked Questions) |
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Why did you do this? After I got my new job (which has me locked away in a dungeon where no radios are allowed), I got tired of not being able to listen to my favorite radio shows during the day. Now my setup lets me record stuff during the day on my Mac and download it to my iPod. Or, if I do get out of the dungeon, I can listen to recordings on my Mac at work over a secure tunnel to Sarek or to my ASIP server. Hasn't this already been done? I have no idea - maybe it has. When I started this project, I couldn't find anything to do what I wanted, and I wanted to play around with CoreAudio anyway, so this way I got the features I wanted. Can you give me a brief history lesson about Sarek? This program was originally a command-line tool that recorded my favorite programs at the right time by making use of a crontab entry. If you're not a UNIX geek, don't be ashamed if you don't know what that is: that's the point of Sarek -- you don't have to be a UNIX geek to use it. I figured I'd like this to be useful to someone other than myself, so I repackaged it with an Aqua interface. But how do I get it to record when I want? You set up the recording parameters the way you want, save the parameters as a document, and then use iCal to kick off your documents at the right time. It's also best to have your Mac power on by itself at certain times. It also helps to have iCal automatically launch (hidden) at startup -- the iCal Helper app (which ultimately launches Sarek) seems to work better if iCal is running. Might just be me. When are you going to tell me not to record copyrighted material? Right now. Don't record copyrighted material for anything other than your own personal use. Why the extremely low version number? This may never go to 1.0. I need the headroom. Why does iTunes crash when I try to listen to a Sarek stream? Some versions of iTunes before 4.6 couldn't handle streaming, not only with Sarek, but also with some internet streams. It looks like they have that fixed in 4.6. Why "Sarek"? It sounds something like the first syllables of "Sound Recorder" mashed together. Plus the name didn't appear to be taken by anyone else's program. And, I think it's the law that software developers have to be Trekkies. |
| Where do I send feedback? |
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Send bug reports and suggestions to support@mmalson.com.
Please be patient with my spam filter.
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| How much does Sarek cost? |
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Sarek is free for personal use. If you really like it and want to express
appreciation, please send a donation to the Steeple Fund of my
church -- our building had no steeple
when we bought it and boy is it plain without one. Or, you can send donations via PayPal to sales@mmalson.com or mark@mmalson.com and I will forward them on to the Steeple Fund. If you intend to use Sarek for profit, please contact me for terms. |