init1
December 28th, 2008, 02:55 PM
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?
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?