Boards like the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black doesn't have sound input/recording capability. It is easy however to add that in with a USB microphone.
This microphone opens up your development board to applications that require sound input such as sound recording, voice chat and voice recognition. It can be plugged directly to one of the USB port.
It is based on a C-Media chip which is a widely used audio chip in Linux. For Raspbian on Raspberry Pi, it is supported right out of the box. You do not need to compile any additional driver to make it work.
To record sound, you can use arecord (installed by default on Raspbian) utility. For example:
sudo arecord -D "plughw: 1,0" -d 5 test.wav
This will record a sound from the microphone for 5 seconds and store it in a file called test.wav
To play it back, use omxplayer:
omxplayer -o local test.wav
and you will hear the recorded sound played through the 3.5mm audio jack (local) of the Raspberry Pi.
The microphone can also be used with other Linux boards such as BeagleBone Black and Odroid-C1+ as well as a PC running on Windows.
