Voice Recorder (Sound Recorder before

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

) is an audio recording program included in most versions of the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. Its user interface has been replaced twice in the past.

Evolution

Sound Recorder has been in most versions and editions of Windows since

Windows 3.0 Windows 3.0 is the third major release of Microsoft Windows, launched in 1990. It features a new graphical user interface (GUI) where applications are represented as clickable icons, as opposed to the list of file names seen in its predeces ...

, including

Windows 9x Windows 9x is a generic term referring to a series of Microsoft Windows computer operating systems produced from 1995 to 2000, which were based on the Windows 95 kernel and its underlying foundation of MS-DOS, both of which were updated in su ...

Windows Server Windows Server (formerly Windows NT Server) is a group of operating systems (OS) for servers that Microsoft has been developing since July 27, 1993. The first OS that was released for this platform was Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server. With the r ...

and the client versions of

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system. The first version of Win ...

. Even

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants. Its origin dated back to Windows CE in 1996, though Windows Mobile itself first appeared in 2000 as Pock ...

came with one. Its user interface and feature set saw very little change until

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

, when features that lacked practicality were discontinued and Sound Recorder was simplified. This version of Sound Recorder was included in

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...

and Windows 8.1, but did not make it to

. A second, different Sound Recorder was introduced in Windows 8.1, thus Windows 8.1 has two distinct apps called Sound Recorder. This second app was a Windows Store app and adhered to the design tenets of the

Metro design language Microsoft Design Language (or MDL), previously known as Metro, is a design language created by Microsoft. This design language is focused on typography and simplified icons, absence of clutter, increased content to chrome ratio ("content bef ...

. Leaked images of a preview version

Windows 10 Mobile Windows 10 Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft. First released in 2015, it is a successor to Windows Phone 8.1, but was marketed by Microsoft as being an edition of its PC operating system Windows 10. Wind ...

showed this app too. When Windows 10 released, however, it was renamed Voice Recorder. The original Sound Recorder was removed from Windows 10.

Features

Voice Recorder (known as Sound Recorder before

and for the majority of its history) can record audio from a

microphone A microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike (), is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publ ...

or headset. In addition, many modern sound cards allow their output channels to be recorded through a

loopback Loopback (also written loop-back) is the routing of electronic signals or digital data streams back to their source without intentional processing or modification. It is primarily a means of testing the communications infrastructure. There are m ...

channel, typically called "Wave-Out Mix" or " Stereo Mix". Before Windows Vista, Sound Recorder was capable of: * Playing the audio files that it has recorded * Converting the bit rate, bit depth and

sampling rate In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of "samples". A sample is a value of the signal at a point in time and/or s ...

of the audio file * Inserting other audio files at the beginning, end or the desired location of the current audio * Splitting out parts of the current audio clip * Increasing or decreasing volume in 25% increments * Increase or decrease playback speed in 100% increments * Adding an

echo In audio signal processing and acoustics, an echo is a reflection of sound that arrives at the listener with a delay after the direct sound. The delay is directly proportional to the distance of the reflecting surface from the source and the lis ...

(without reverberation) * Reversing the current audio clip These features, however, were either removed in Windows Vista or taken over by other applications. The playback and trimming features reappeared in Voice Recorder, although Voice Recorder can only play its own recordings. Sound Recorder accepts command-line parameters. This was removed in Windows 8, as Windows Store apps cannot be run with a parameter from the command-line.

File format

Before Windows 7, Sound Recorder could save the recorded audio in waveform audio (.wav) container files. Sound Recorder could also open and play existing .wav files. To successfully open compressed .wav files in Sound Recorder, the audio codec used by the file must be installed in the Audio Compression Manager (ACM); Windows installations dating back to at least Windows 95 came with a selection of standard codecs that included Truespeech,

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such ...

6.10, G.723.1, IMA ADPCM and CCITT

A-law An A-law algorithm is a standard companding algorithm, used in European 8-bit PCM digital communications systems to optimize, i.e. modify, the dynamic range of an analog signal for digitizing. It is one of two versions of the G.711 standar ...

and u-law, with additional codecs being added in later editions. Starting with Windows Vista, Sound Recorder saves recorded audio in

Windows Media Audio Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The ...

(.wma) files instead; the exceptions to this are the Home Basic N and Business N editions, which continue to use .wav. Also, audio metadata such as ''Artist'', ''Album'', ''Title'', and ''Genre'' can be added to the sound file directly while saving the file. Voice Recorder in Windows 10 only records audio in

MPEG-4 Part 14 MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows streaming ...

(.m4a) container formats.

Issues

Versions of Sound Recorder before

recorded audio to memory, rather than to the hard disk, and the length of recording was by default limited to 60 seconds. Microsoft recommends recording 60 seconds and pressing the ''Record'' button again to record another minute. In addition, it is possible to use the Sound Recorder's concatenation feature to increase the length of the audio file. For example, saving an initial 1 minute recording as "1min.wav" and then inserting the "1min.wav" file 9 times creates 10 minutes of recording which can then be saved as "10min.wav". This "10min.wav" file can then be suffixed to itself 5 more times (or as many times as there is room in memory) to create a "1hour.wav" file. By recording over any of these longer sound files, Sound Recorder can have an uninterrupted arbitrary recording time (limited only by primary memory). In 32-bit versions of Windows before

, on computers with more than 2 GB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

, after recording (but not when playing), Sound Recorder will return an error message indicating that there is not enough memory. This is a design flaw of older versions of ''Sound Recorder'' and officially cannot be resolved except by reducing the amount of available physical memory. There does, however, exist an

unofficial patch An unofficial patch is a patch for a piece of software, created by a third party such as a user community without the involvement of the original developer. Similar to an ordinary patch, it alleviates bugs or shortcomings. Unofficial patches do ...

that resolves this problem. Another solution to the 'not enough memory' error is to run the program in compatibility mode. This can be achieved by right clicking on the .exe file, then selecting: properties, compatibility tab, 'run this program in compatibility for', and selecting the appropriate option, such as 'Windows XP Service Pack 2'. The Sound Recorder in Windows Vista and later uses the hard disk for recording audio and can therefore record audio up to any length as long as there is free space on the hard disk drive.

References

{{Windows Components Sound recorder Audio recording software Microsoft Windows multimedia technology