Akasha

Akasha is a headless recording app, designed to split recordings into multiple segments to make them easier to manage.

It's designed for low-resource consumption, making it useful as a background process for e.g. recording meetings, without having to keep OBS up, or write a jank shell utility involving sox or ffmpeg.

It theoretically supports every major platform (though I haven't bothered to test it on non-Linux ones, I have tried to only use platform independent libraries).

It supports autodetecting input devices, manually specifying devices by name, and features a reasonably intuitive command line. To get started, most of the time, you can do:

bash akasha rec --path-dir ~/MyAudioDirectory/

Where --path-dir is the directory it will write files into.

If you do not specify --path-dir, e.g.:

bash akasha rec

...it will default to ~/Audio/akasha/, where ~ is your home directory.

Any directories that do not already exist, will be automatically created.

If the default audio device it detects is incorrect, you can override it. First, get a list of all available input devices:

```bash

akasha probe --type input-devices ALSA lib pcmoss.c:397:(sndpcmossopen) Cannot open device /dev/dsp ALSA lib pcmoss.c:397:(sndpcmossopen) Cannot open device /dev/dsp ALSA lib pcmroute.c:877:(findmatchingchmap) Found no matching channel map ALSA lib pcmroute.c:877:(findmatchingchmap) Found no matching channel map ALSA lib pcmroute.c:877:(findmatchingchmap) Found no matching channel map ALSA lib pcmroute.c:877:(findmatchingchmap) Found no matching channel map ALSA lib pcmroute.c:877:(findmatchingchmap) Found no matching channel map ALSA lib pcmroute.c:877:(findmatchingchmap) Found no matching channel map ALSA lib pcmdsnoop.c:566:(sndpcmdsnoopopen) unable to open slave ALSA lib pcmdsnoop.c:566:(sndpcmdsnoopopen) unable to open slave [ "jack", "pipewire", "pulse", "default", "sysdefault:CARD=Generic", "front:CARD=Generic,DEV=0", "surround40:CARD=Generic,DEV=0", "surround51:CARD=Generic,DEV=0", "surround71:CARD=Generic,DEV=0", ] ```

You'll have to forgive the ALSA vomit -- the cause seems to be CPAL not setting the error handler correctly. Maybe I'll make a PR and fix that at some point.

Anyway, you can now pull audio from that specific device:

```bash akasha rec --device "pulse" --path-dir ~/Audio ````

There's also a cute real-time display of volume intensity, that works using SIMD calculations of audio volume via RMS. You can pass the --display flag if you want that.

TODO:

• [ ] Add warnings for if f32 stream is all zeros, so that the user doesn't have to enable --display mode to tell.
• [ ] Refactor error handling logic with snafu.
• [ ] Nicer error messages
• [ ] Eventually refactor out all the stream logic into audio-stream crate, maybe?
• [x] Default recording path to make more novice-friendly.
• [ ] Maybe fix raw mode not working with logging facilities (/n -> /r/n).
• [ ] Fix tracebacks not working with raw mode (https://werat.dev/blog/pretty-rust-backtraces-in-raw-terminal-mode/)