Manauton Project Homepage

What is Manauton ?

Manauton is a program used to digitally record sound. Manauton can operate in a manual or autonomous mode, hence the name Manauton.

When in manual mode, recording can be paused and unpaused with a key-press or remote control. This is similar to a tape recorder, but with a difference, there is no latency! As a matter of fact, Manauton works with negative latency. This negative latency cancels out the effect of the human latency associated with hearing a sound interpreting it and reacting to the sound. Negative latency is accomplished by buffering the sound in memory prior to recording to disk.

When operating in autonomous mode, Manauton starts and stops the recording automatically based on the sound and time of day. the sound based trigger can be something as simple as a sound level or something as complex as an FFT (your mileage may vary with processor power).

What do I need in order to run Manauton?

A working C-compiler such as GCC

Manauton is written in ANSI-C with POSIX extensions. At the current time there is no binary release of Manauton.

A working Linux/GNU system (any processor)

Currently Manauton is limited to Linux/GNU systems because Manauton only has modules for the OSS and ALSA sound API's. Manauton can compiled to run on other POSIX OS's when modules are written for new sound API's.

What is Manauton's the current level of development?

Manauton in currently in the early beta stage (development level 0.1.x).

• All parameters are set when the Manauton is executed from the command line.
• A curses based interface provides information of the amplitude of the sound being recorded, and Manauton's pause/record state. When in autonomous mode the curses interface provides information on how the incoming sound companies to the threshold.
• Manual triggering can be done with either the keyboard or by assigning pause and record to buttons of a Microsoft mouse.

Future plans for Manauton

I plan on building an embedded device on which to run the Manauton program. As planned, the device will consist of a single board computer, hard drive, sound interface and a LCD display all packed in a portable lockable box. An example of the type of LCD displays that I plan to use can be found here.

For updates on the embedded Manauton project keep an eye on this page.

Manauton modular design

Manauton is designed to be modular. I envision that auto-triggering modules will be the most utilized module. This will allow a highly customized triggering environment for each user.

Modules will allow for a verity of interfaces such as the embedded LCD displays along with more widely available interfaces such as curses and GUI interfaces.

Modules will also be available to allow the user to communicate to Manauton with a variety of human interface devices such as game port devices and USB devices.

Links to Manauton documentation

Here are links to the documentation distributed with Manauton.

• README - Basic operation of Manauton
• NEWS - information on user visible changes
• INSTALL - instructions on building and installing Manauton
• TODO - what's next for Manauton

Who is on the Manauton development team?

Me, Steven Feil, I am the only person working on Manauton at this time. I can be reached from my SourceForge user page here. Please include [Manauton] in the subject line of your e-mail, this will prevent your message from being thrown out with the spam.