Hi, This is very early days in my Nerves journey. Does anyone know what route to take for getting good quality audio recording on Nerves (probably a Raspberry Pi)? Toying with the idea of building a long running bird song recorder for ecological research and wondered if this was at the “sure just …

I would say that the problem greatly depends on the hardware you are using. There are many types of microphones and interfaces but you will likely want to use a HAT with an I2S interface or use a USB sound card. For the quality of the recordings, I think the biggest factor will be the actual microp…

[image] BigTom: Toying with the idea of building a long running bird song recorder for ecological research What’s your power budget look like for this application? A lot of fancy audio capture stuff is going to assume you’re either plugged in (studio etc) or only want to use it for a couple h…

[image] al2o3cr: The other neat thing that can be done with the tiny I2S microphones is using a bunch of them and then applying post-processing (similar to techniques used in radar) to form directional “beams” that can be adjusted after recording. Does RPI support I2S at hardware level?

I have built membrane with the portaudio library for Nerves but never got to testing it. Should work fine for getting raw audio into Elixir for processing and media pipeline fun. The challenge is almost certainly in getting a good microphone setup as mentioned above.

I believe so: On the RPi4, there’s a 2-channel PCM peripheral available on GPIO18-21. On the RPi5, there are 3 separate I2S peripherals provided by the RP1. (2-4 channels each)

Thanks for this, with current progress and solar and batteries I am pretty confident I can meet the power needs within my budget (unless I am orders of magnitude wrong). I am starting from a VERY LOW level of knowledge here so I will be starting as simple as possible. OTOH - sounds very cool!

Support for high quality microphone

Questions & Help Questions

D4no0 December 13, 2024, 8:32pm 4

Does RPI support I2S at hardware level?