Mic on Raspberry Pi

31/01/2014 - Category: Raspberry PI

![mic](https://misapuntesde.com/images/2014/01/mic.jpg)

Test Labs

Don't know if happen to you that sometimes you have many things to do but an idea arises, an email from someone, something you think you can do, and leave it all to get to it.

That's what happened to me today. I wanted to test a microphone on the *Pi* and I'll do it. Will it work?

I have one that comes with the *Singstar PS2* with an USB adapter. *Karaoke* is one of my passions frustrated.

I remind you that the *Raspberry Pi* has no microphone input and the only way to try one with *Jack* connector is buying a external *USB Sound Card*.

The first thing we have to do when Raspbian boot up is to check if any microphone is detected. There are many ways to do it, but I remember now this:


lsusb

Mic detedted!. Press to full size.

As you can see, has been detected in the device *006* a **Microphone Sony SingStar USB**.

Now let's see where it has been placed in the list of sound cards (the system detects it as a sound card):


cat /proc/asound/cards

Card num. 1 is a USB-Audio - USBMIC. Press to full size.

With that information we can now launch a recording program. I'll use **arecord** that comes installed with *ALSA utilities*:


arecord -f cd -D hw:1,0 -d 20 text.wav

With this parameters we recorded with **CD quality** for **20 seconds** a file called *test.wav*, using the hardware of the **card 1** (microphone).

To play the sound, with a simple **aplay test.wav** is enought. If you don't hear anything, in *advanced options* with **sudo raspi-config** utility you can change the audio output *jack to HDMI* and vice versa...

**ADDITIONAL NOTE**: If after the first record we detect that the recordings are incorrect, we have to disable the *USB 2.0* driver to use the *USB 1.1*. To do this, add the file */boot/cmdline.txt* to the next line, to ensure that the recording is done perfectly: