A Raspberry Pi based USB audio recorder controlled through BitFocus Companion
This is intended to be installed on a dedicated Raspberry Pi which is also running BitFocus Companion. The canonical configuration would be to connect this to a Behringer XR18 mixer to support recording some or all of the 18 input channels.
Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 with at least 4GB of memory and BitFocus Companion installed
- USB connected audio interface (e.g. XR18)
- USB disk. This is expected to be mounted on /media/user and contain a directory called RECORD. Files will be saved in Apple Core Audio Format (CAF) using names of the for yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss.caf
- Optional Elgato Stream Deck for control
The recorder can be controlled either through a Stream Deck or through the web based emulator Companion.
The file USBRecord.companionconfig can be imported into Bitfocus Companion to set up the default set of buttons, which currently provides the following:
- Record/Stop (this button will be labeled Record when the recorder is idle and Stop when it is active)
- Below the Record/Stop button is a display-only button which dynamically displays the size of the current file when recording is active
- Channels: n - selects the number of channels to record, between 2 and 18. A short press on the button increments the number of channels, a long press decrements.
- Control Page: Switches to a page of buttons with control functions
- Main Page: Switches back to the main page of buttons
- Reset - this button resynchronizes Companion with the recorder, it should only be needed if the usbrecord service is restarted
- Shutdown: A long press on this button shuts down and powers off the recorder Pi
The recorder program will try to log errors, for example a failure to start the record process, to the Companion custom variable custom:record_log
The installation script does the following
- installs BitFocus Companion (if not already running)
- installs a service 'pi-usb-automount' which automounts USB drives on systems which are not running a desktop
- creates a new systemctl service usbrecord which will run at system startup as the current user
The Quick Install procedure below uses a copy of the application from the repository, which was pre-built for ARM64 Debian based systems (e.g. Raspian, Armbian) using pyinstaller. Alternatively you can clone the repository and build your own copy prior to running the install script
- Currently, you have to import the USBRecord.companionconfig by hand to set up the buttons
- You must enable the OSC server under "Settings->Protocol" (settings are apparently not saved on a .companionconfig export)
- In order for the shutdown command to work, you must use ssh-keygen to create a private key for user companion (in /home/companion/.ssh) and install the associated public key in /home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys
rm -rf USBRecord-Control; git clone https://github.com/DanTappan/USBRecord-Control; ( cd USBRecord-Control; bash ./install.sh )