Audio Recording from the Linux Shell

This just a quick note about something I tried and hope that this information will be useful to me someday. First of all, let's check the available recording devices on our machine using the following command.

arecord -l

I received an output like the following.

Using the details we received from the above command, we can now capture any audio device as follows. If you want to record multiple devices at the same time, you can do that using two terminal windows. 

Built-in stereo sound card

ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i hw:1,0 -t 30 ~/Desktop/card1-device0.wav

USB mono sound card

ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 1 -i hw:2,0 -t 30 ~/Desktop/card2-device0.wav

 That's it!