Over the weekend I had to make a recording on my Android phone. I used the app Virtual Recorder  thinking I’d be able to just share the file afterwards but Virtual Recorder creates pcm files not typical mp3 files. I sent the file over to my Linux laptop, running Linux mint, to convert it.

Initially I had some trouble getting the conversion to work. Here are the steps I took.

Open a terminal window and navigate to the where the pcm file is. If you don’t know how to do this use the GUI file explorer to navigate to the directory where the pcm file is and then right click on white space and click on the option to open a terminal window. The terminal will open already set to run against the directory the pcm file is located in.

If you try to run any of the commands below and you don’t have ffmpeg installed you will be notified ffmpeg needs to be installed and it will give you the command to type in and run to install it.

If you want to convert a Virtual Recorder file specially you can use this terminal command below changing the file names to what you need.

ffmpeg -f s16le -ar 11250 -ac 2 -i YouInputFileName.pcm -ar 44100 -ac 2 YouOutputFileName.wav

Converting pcm files created by other applications may have varying results due to the sample rate of the source file. For example if you replace 11250 with 22500 as in the command below your output file pitch and speed will be increased. So you may need to play around with sample rates to get the output right.

ffmpeg -f s16le -ar 22500 -ac 2 -i YouInputFileName.pcm -ar 44100 -ac 2 YouOutputFileName.wav