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use of Sound Recorder hold mouse over image to get image caption.
 Sound Recorder has been a standard Windows item since
Windows 3.1 and found on most all the versions of Windows. It is not
fancy but it does a few things reasonably well. The function is much
like that of a simple cassette recorder as far as recorder, playback,
pause, fast forward and rewind. It should record from a mic attached
to your sound card microphone input also. To Start sound recorder you should be able to go to the start button, then programs, then accessories, then entertainment on most Windows 9x/ME systems. It may be slightly different on Windows 3.1 and early Windows 95 versions, or customized Windows versions. I am not sure it is on Windows NT or not, but it should function on Windows 2000 Professional the same as the Windows 98 version. The next thing you will see is the actual control face of the Sound Recorder program once you open it. While it is not an impressive program to look at it functions in a fairly straight forward manner much like a cassette recorder would.  You should notice that the controls only function when a file is
loaded or the recording process starts. To open an existing WAV file
go to File, then Open, then browse to the file on your system you
wish to open. Keep in mind Sound Recorder only is intended for use
with WAV formats. To change the size or format of an existing file to
use a smaller format you would first open the file as mentioned above
then, goto File, then select the Properties option. This will open
the Properties for Sound screen as shown here. Then click the convert
button and it will open the Sound Formats screen.  The codec
used for the sound compression by Sound Recorder is found here. It
should list the codecs available on your computer. Keep in mind the
format selected will have a great effect on the size the WAV file is
when you are done, as well as the audio properties of the file.
Hint: it is a very good idea to use the SAVE AS option when
saving the file generated in the conversion. This will keep the file
you started with intact until you have a chance to review the size
and audio of the file. The higher the quality of the audio properties the larger the file size and the faster the bit rate on your system. As a rule of thumb here are some Bit Rates commonly used so you can decide on the amount of compression you desire. Keep in mind these are about what you can expect, and that no two installations are identical.  Other handy features included with Sound Recorder include Editing features to remove parts before and after a given position on a given recording, even join two different files together. You can also add echo and other effects. These effects generally are done on files in the PCM format and usually before any additional compression is added to the audio. Two factors to keep in mind when editing sounds. The first being if you keep saving the results as different files you should be able to go back to the sound you started with. Second, it is unlikely you can take a very compressed file say at 7 kb/sec and convert it back to 56 kb / sec and have good audio. Or to put it another way you can always go down on the sound quality without much problem, however going up on the sound quality has limitations due to noise and loss from compression. You do not reduce file size in some cases by 90% and not have some downside. Note Sound Quality and file size are also dependant on format ( codec ) used. The default in most Windows versions is PCM format which tends to be rather large. Lernout & Hauspie is typically the smallest (WAV) format but lacks in audio quality for most functions other than voice. MPEG Layer 3 (Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec) is perhaps the smallest codec with full range audio quality in common use.
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| © Joanna (aka easy2confuse) Last Revised on 11-6-2003 |