Notices

Trust me, I had considered that. But it is not ideal for a number of reasons. To start with, I would like to have "some" visual indication that Orecchiette is recording. That means either bring up the full GUI anyway or rewrite the app with two GUIs, which sounds like a real nightmare. Also, GUI or no GUI, running Orecchiette would still take the same amount of RAM so one may as well have the GUI running as it is now.

I need to come up with something else for the challenge

Frankly, I can perfectly live without such notification. Option in the Orecchiette settings enabling background recording of program (one for temporary enabling/disabling, and a checkbox for "persistent after reboot") would be all that is needed.

Bringing any indicators during a call i extremely bad idea, considering all the things with CPU and RAM priorities calls have (and should have). *Maybe* you could rig a new indicator LED pattern, that would fire up when Orecchiette daemon is recording - this could work without interruptions, for example, showing red "record" led when it's recording - but I'm still not sure that it's necessary, (albeit cool) so if could be optional, the better.

Also, I think that having 0 GUI would allow to load less things into memory/CPU after all, wouldn't it? It would need to only do a small subset of things Orecchiette is doing now (command for recording with [pre]set parameters, command to stop). Sure, recording is still most intensive task, but all that GUI drawing would be gone.

Or, maybe it should be done just like Torchio/Lanterne, i.e. GUI-less second application, and that 2nd one would be daemonized?

There must be a way - after all, despite being badly written and unreliable, recaller *was* working for recording conversations, without impacting actucal call.

/Estel

I suspect the memory and CPU load of the GUI is vanishingly small compared to the frankly enormous cost of using GStreamer to grab two different audio streams, combine them, convert them to another format, and save them to a file.

I would guess that at least some of the unreliability of recaller is due to it saturating the CPU, and the only reason the actual call is not impacted is that the OS is favoring it over other processes. (Certainly, this seems to be the case when Orecchiette saturates the CPU.)

OK, I've had a VERY brief play with it, measuring the memory consumption with and without GUI etc. Below are rough RSS values as reported by 'top'.

Start recording without starting the GUI was too much work for a short experiment like that but if those numbers scale well then a GUI-less app that does just recording should take less memory than a GUI app that does nothing.

I think it's worth trying after all. I will continue this topic in the Orecchiette thread but you might need to be patient. It's a school break which means more quality time with the kids and less time left for programming.

About notification:

some time ago i packaged aosd:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1412324

And with aosd_cat you can obtain great results without use a complete gui to show some info while doing other things.


One request (or two):

in my opinion it would be better to set the delay (-t) in seconds or ms.
Also the morse code should have a speed rate parameter (i suppose that not all of us are so experienced to understand something at that speed...)
..Morse is not dead: https://www.fit.ac.jp/~tanaka/fitsat.shtml

Just noticed while in the package interface, Torchio has no icon.
As per Maemo packaging guidelines CLI applications should have a terminal-like icon to indicate they have no GUI.

Have a look at zzztop for an example.
I don't think there's an issue with overlaying a pasta shape over this example, if you wish

Thanks! I've pushed up an update to Torchio, with the following icon. (Hopefully it isn't too bad...)

Drat, can't believe I missed this request last week. Sorry about that.

I'm not sure that I want to change the way that the timeout is defined; if you're wanting to stop the display in just a few milliseconds, it seems to me that you're trying to do something different than just avoiding battery drain...

However, setting the speed of the Morse code display is easy, and I really should have just copied over the code from Lanterne in the first place. Torchio 0.0.4 is now moving up to extras-devel, and has a new option "-d nnn" which sets the dot duration value. The "nnn" is a numeric value describing the amount of milliseconds that a dot should be held. Torchio currently supports values from 1 millisecond to 600000 milliseconds (10 minutes). This should affect the speed of the pulsed, SOS, and Morse code modes.

Very cool! (Although I could see this kind of technology becoming very irritating, if advertisers start trying to use it. )