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Is is possible to use the 3.5 jack on the Raspberry Pi as a line-in?

I need to record audio through the Pi and I didn't find anything conclusive about its audio capabilities. Would like to make sure before searching for a sound card.

Dumitru
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1 Answers1

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You cannot record sound through the 3.5 jack of the Pi right now. See here http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#audioStandard

As an alternative you can use a sound card like the Wolfson or a USB microphone/sound card. If you go with the Wolfson (which is the option I went with) there are two important things to know before you buy:

  • It does not work with the B+ version of the Pi, which is really the only one getting stocked right now
  • Unless you're up for compiling your own kernel, you're going to have to use Raspbian 3.10 or so
  • You won't be able to record at rates below 32kHz; this seems to be a bug that they're working on fixing. You can downsample, but that will just put more strain on your CPU, so that doesn't seem like a great option to me.

Even given all the above, the Wolfson works pretty well for my purposes. If you already have a Pi, I would recommend the Wolfson if you have an A or a B, and a USB card/mic if you have a B+. If you don't have one, you're probably better off sticking with a USB option for now, since it will be extra work locating a deprecated Pi for no real benefit.

vlsd
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