line-in recording suggestions to record ocean waves?

[dh003i]

Hi all,

I'm at the Outer Banks, NC. I have an older laptop (Gateway laptop from 2002, I think) and my Cowon D2 mp3 player. The D2, while a great player, is a pretty awful recorder of just about anything due (high background noise & hiss, low sensitivity), which is expected.

So I'm left with my laptop and using a microphone to the microphone line-in jack. Any suggestions for what microphone to get to record the sound of ocean waves & that feel (i.e., also includes crickets and other sounds).

Is buying an external mic the best solution, or should would a stand-alone digital sound recorder produce better results?

PS: This is just for personal use for me and some friends. I mainly want to improve clearly over the audio-quality of the D2 recording. For a line-in microphone for my laptop or a stand-along recorder, if something is significantly more expensive than another option but doesn't produce significantly better audio quality, I'm not interested in that.

[Bircoph]

Afaik the only thing you can tune is record quality params (i.e. man arecord).
Try something like -c2 -f FLOAT64_LE -r48000, though I doubt your hardware can provide such quality, -f dat maybe just enough for your setup.

You may pipe this to oggenc -q 10 or similar.
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