How to record system audio on Linux

One of the most interesting, Linux is an incredibly viable 'candidate' as a creative workstation. For example, for audio creation, there are some great standard tools available to users, like Audacity and Ardor. Overall, this is a powerful and flexible system. This tutorial shows you how to record audio in Linux, both from microphone and system, using Audacity and PulseAudio.

Install Audacity

Audacity is available in a lot of distributions. It is usually available in the main archives.

For Ubuntu / Ubuntu / Ubuntu-based distributions:

sudo apt install audacity

For Fedora:

sudo dnf install audacity

For OpenSuse:

sudo zypper install audacity

For Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S install audacity

If you like Snaps or Flatpaks, both are available.

flatpak install flathub org.audacityteam.Audacity

Or:

sudo snap install audacity

Install PulseAudio Volume Control

This is the app you'll use to record audio from the system. It's a great way to collect audio from videos, songs, or other media for later use. If you've ever wondered how people get high-quality sound samples, here's one way to do it.

PulseAudio Volume Control is available in most large archives. You will use the same commands as above to install it.

For Ubuntu / Ubuntu / Ubuntu-based distributions:

sudo apt install pavucontrol

For Fedora:

sudo dnf install pavucontrol

For OpenSuse:

sudo zypper install pavucontrol

For Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S install pavucontrol

PulseAudio Volume Control is also available as Flatpak but not as Snap.

flatpak install org.pulseaudio.pavucontrol

Record audio from microphone

Once you've plugged in the microphone into the system, open Audacity. It will automatically find the hardware and open it for recording.

Just click the big red record button. Everything is as simple as that! Audacity is a simple tool to use, so it's hard to make mistakes.

Record audio from the system

This is a bit more complicated. Press the record button, just like above. This will start recording from the microphone. Once you've recorded it, open PulseAudio Volume Control and navigate to the 'Recording' tab .

Click the drop-down menu that says: 'ALSA plug-in [audacity]… from' .

Select the option that says: 'Monitor of Built-In Analog Stereo' . This will track the information the application is sending to PulseAudio and record that information instead of the sound coming from the microphone.

From there, go ahead and play whatever sound you want, and you'll see that sound show up in Audacity as it plays. You can stop recording and process whatever audio you're recording, just like any other audio input into Audacity.

Hope you learned a few useful things about Audacity and PulseAudio Volume Control. Now you know how to record your system sounds in Linux!

Micah Soto

Update 21 September 2020