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Glad to see pulseaudio-support is on the roadmap (shouldn't be too hard really). On Linux I have never had a proper ALSA recording with ffmpeg, due to ALSA "xruns", i.e. bad buffers. Pulse may be using a bulldozer to drive in a nail, but it doesn't yield this problem.

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yes, however still need some digging on this as my experience lacks a bit when it comes to sound on linux.

You could use pacmd to gather the list of microphones and monitors. ffmpeg supports "-f pulse" in place of your "-f alsa".

thanks. Btw do you guys have any good article links about the differences between pulse and alsa and why one might be superior to the other.

Pulse has more features, but sits atop alsa. So it's not generally one or the other as pulse still needs alsa underneath. I don't have any docs on which is 'better' but a quick search reveals a lot of opinion on the matter. Bear in mind many Linux distros introduced Pulse a little early (Ubuntu [my employer] included). This caused quite a bit of hatred for it, as it was a bit unstable. Now those issues are mostly gone, and it Just Works™.

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