Are specialty applications useless?

[init1]

So I was using Stumbleupon today (it's a Firefox extension for finding and review websites) and I came across and application that records sound files in Windows. I was looking for a simple program like this a while back, and although I'm not in Windows right now and can't try it out, I gave it a positive rating. When I checked the comments for the site however, most of them were negative. They can be summarized by "Audacity does all this and more", and "Windows already has a sound recorder". This really surprised me.
Audacity does a lot, but most of the time, it's way more than I need. All I need is an application for recording sound and saving it to a file. I don't need to view or edit what I've recorded.
I understand that there is a sound recorder already included in Windows, but it is extremely limited. You can get past the initial 60 second limit by using "Decrease Speed" but I've never been able to get much farther than 500 seconds before I run out of memory. This means that in order to record something long, I have to open up 4 or so instances of Sound Recorder, open up a large blank wav file for each of them, and monitor them so that I can start the next instance when one runs out of space. Sound Recorder also has a tendency to stop recording randomly, so I can just leave it running the background.
Like I've said, Audacity does what I need it to, but I don't like using such a feature-rich app for such a simple and specialized purpose. It would be like starting up Firefox just so that you can view a picture on your hard drive.

This leads to my point: are specialty applications like this really useless if larger applications exist? This is like saying "What's the point of grep? Gedit has a search tool and does so much more", or "What's the point of fdisk? Gparted makes partitions and does so much more". What's your opinion on this?

[Bucky Ball]

Despite it's many features, Audacity is still extremely lightweight and should make doing what you want to do with it a breeze. Grabbing sound on the fly, trimming the ends and exporting as a sound file is one of its bread and butter uses.

When you look at high end audio production software, Audacity actually is pretty basic (but great and used from domestic to professional).

[ZuLuuuuuu]

Audacity was just an example, I think, and you can't judge people on whether they think right, if he thinks Audacity is much more than he wanted than, well, it is...

I extremely agree with the point init1 makes. If I have a small task to do, I search for a simple app to do it, and do it well. Instead, I end up having a bloated, slow, doing much more than what I wanted but usually buggy or a bad-user-experience product. Or sometimes I find software doing everything but what I wanted :)

On the other hand, some big software which are very well written and doing the job I need, are also present but then, I just need a simple thing to do (most probably a job that can be done with just 1-click) and I have to learn how to use that complicated piece of product (having tens of buttons and menu options). As an example, I don't know how many times I encountered a thread of a user wanting a simple mp3 player to just play an mp3 file by double clicking on it and gets answers "Why don't you like Amarok, it is the best player in the world?".

I am a fan of such small, cute, but useful software, just doing 1 job well and nothing more. Sometimes I find such software and use them for years...

So, sometimes "just need to record a voice" means "just need to record a voice" and nothing else :)

[fwojciec]

Linux has different logic than Windows because of CLI. Small specialized applications are perfect in Linux, because they can be used in scripts, you can pipe output of one into the the other, make them work together to achieve the effect you want... Because Windows uses GUIs exclusively it will always tend to integrate a lot of different functionalities into a single interface, which is to say a single application.