There is more green space and trees around me where I am now, with many more garden birds, though no sparrows1, and occasionally some tawny owls in the night.
Tawny owls, recorded ME66 handheld
So thoughts turn to a garden recording gizmo again. I have enough power, and a network connection to a shed, a oddly wind-sheltered location and many trees nearby. For short term recordings in the field I am still in favour of the timed field recorder approach, but for the garden where I have power and data the Pi still scores. You don’t have to fiddle with it, it’s entirely remote controlled. Many years ago I had a PC in the garage which was the music server, I used a piece of software called loop recorder on that. This cat fight is one of my favourite urban recordings from that time.
although I was really trying to record a hedge full of sparrows. A loop recorder lets you go back and catch things like that, and the microphone would be much closer to the area where the owls are.
So I thought I’d revisit this Cirrus Logic audio card, particularly as a case for a Pi with this mounted was being sold off cheap for £5
The Cirrus is the only audio card for the Raspberry Pi that lets you record sound with it, as opposed to the legion of DAC cards for the Pi. You can, of course, use a USB sound card instead, though that precludes using a Model A if you want to use wifi and have the lowest power.
The good news is that a hero hacker, Matthias Reichl, has sorted out the drivers, it’s now a RPI-update rather than patching kernels and esoteric crap.
The bad news is that the manufacturer discontinued the card 🙁 Having said that, it still seems to be available for about £60 if you work hard enough, GIYF. That’s dear – a Behringer UCA202 is a good Pi compatible USB sound card for about £24, line level input. The Cirrus Logic card offers a bit more sensitivity and on board mic bias. Continue reading “Cirrus Logic audio card for the Raspberry Pi revisited”