Friday, August 22, 2003
Capturing Your Voice for Posterity : Resco Audio Recorder 2.11 Reviewed
Posted by John Walkosak in "SOFTWARE" @ 09:00 AM
Sure, the voice recorder feature of the Pocket PC is nice and all, but only for making a quick voice memo. What if you need more – to record a meeting or a lecture? The voice recorder falls short. Audio Recorder v2.11 by Resco aims to fill this bill. But does it work?
I go to a lot of meetings and at many of them I am responsible taking the meeting minutes. As many of you can attest, many times during meetings, multiple people talk at once, and many people talk rapidly. Now, I’m no court stenographer, so it’s tough to be able write everything as it’s said. In the past I have used a micro cassette recorder to record the meeting for playback later. But hey, I have a Pocket PC, and I don’t want to carry anything else. So, I started to look for something beyond the basic voice recorder that’s on my Pocket PC. That search led me to Audiorecorder.
What’s it do?
Audiorecorder seeks to overcome the shortcomings of the voice notes – namely those of filesize and file manipulation (the ability to rename and/or edit a file). The default format for audio on the Pocket PC is a WAV file, which can make for some really honkin’ big files. Audiorecorder states that it has the following capabilities:
The main interface is attractive, and harkens to a handheld recorder. To continue this theme, the software can remap the hardware so that the software can be run completely without the stylus, making it very easy to pull out and use in a meeting. This is a really nice touch.
Figure 1: Mapping of Hardware keys, from the instruction documentation.
Capturing Your Voice for Posterity
The software can save to the standard WAV file or for longer recording sessions you can save to an MP3 file (of various compressions) giving you lots of playback options. One of the power features allows for the tagging of your recorded files. This means that, during playback only, you can mark certain portions of your audio as areas of interest, and send these out into another file. This is a great function, because it allows you to play back the audio of, say, an hour long meeting, and tag only the portion during which your client agrees to triple your fee! This tagged file can then be saved separately into its own file, and saved, emailed, etc. A really cool side feature allows you to tag any appropriate file, not just your own recordings; you can use this to crop out snippets of your favorite MP3 file. It's not really a sound editor, but you can do a lot with this feature.
Figure 2: Tagging a portion of the audio.
Figure 3: List of tagged areas of sound file.
Figure 4: Exporting the tagged portion to a new file.
Can you Hear Me Now?
While the software is supposed to be able to let you save to an MP3 file, I had a difficulty with this.
There are two sets of settings for each file you record: file type (which translates into compression) and microphone sensitivity. As mentioned above, the file type means saving to a .WAV file for better quality, or to an MP3 file for longer but poorer quality files. Microphone sensitivity refers to the ability of the software to detect sounds away from the microphone, and to some extent to operate as a voice activated recorder. Both attempt to level out the microphone volume and make for a more even sounding playback. By adjusting sensitivity, you can have the software record sound only above a certain volume, etc.
When recording to a .WAV file, I got good results with both settings, but when I tried to record to an MP3 file, the sound was unusable. I used this software to record a meeting in a large council meeting chamber, and the sound file was very nearly unintelligible. Listening to it gave me a headache (and not just because it was a council meeting) because it was filled with fragments of words: the beginnings and/or ends of words were cut off, sentences were skipped, etc. Adjusting the microphone gain in the control panel never seems to be any help.
Figure 5: The software gives you the ability to choose standard and long play file types.
Look Ma! No Hands!
The software also has a scheduled recording feature, which would allow you to set a timer, and set recording to start automatically. This could be a really useful feature; for example, you arrive at you meeting five minutes early, and don't want to be bothered remembering to start the recorder when everyone else shows up. Just set the schedule for five minutes in the future, and then set it for the anticipated length of the meeting, and viola! You're set to go.
Figure 5: The recording scheduler claims to give you the ability to record unattended.
This feature comes in handy. Just set it and forget it, as they say on TV. However, I should caution that it may not be legal in your area to use this function to record a meeting without the participant’s knowledge.
Gotchas
Overall, this is a good package, with the only exception being the disappointing quality of the MP3 files. This is a serious flaw in an otherwise good product.
Where To Buy
The software can be downloaded from Handango or purchased for $19.95 (affiliate link).
Specifications
This program will work on any Pocket PC 2002 device – I do not know if the program will work Windows Mobile 2003 (I am still waiting for my HP 2215) :? . It takes 712 kb of memory.
Conclusions
While the program has a great interface and hardware button mapping, and a really useful file tagging feature, I was disappointed that my files saved as MP3s were not usable. Overall however, this will be a useful addition for those who need to extend the capabilities of the voice recorder.
I go to a lot of meetings and at many of them I am responsible taking the meeting minutes. As many of you can attest, many times during meetings, multiple people talk at once, and many people talk rapidly. Now, I’m no court stenographer, so it’s tough to be able write everything as it’s said. In the past I have used a micro cassette recorder to record the meeting for playback later. But hey, I have a Pocket PC, and I don’t want to carry anything else. So, I started to look for something beyond the basic voice recorder that’s on my Pocket PC. That search led me to Audiorecorder.
What’s it do?
Audiorecorder seeks to overcome the shortcomings of the voice notes – namely those of filesize and file manipulation (the ability to rename and/or edit a file). The default format for audio on the Pocket PC is a WAV file, which can make for some really honkin’ big files. Audiorecorder states that it has the following capabilities:
- Can record to an MP3 (Better compression for longer files);
- Can record to a. WAV file (Better sound quality, but the files are big);
- Can tag portions of a file for editing;
- Can use voice activated recording (if you say so);
- Can set a timer for a recording to begin and end.
The main interface is attractive, and harkens to a handheld recorder. To continue this theme, the software can remap the hardware so that the software can be run completely without the stylus, making it very easy to pull out and use in a meeting. This is a really nice touch.
Figure 1: Mapping of Hardware keys, from the instruction documentation.
Capturing Your Voice for Posterity
The software can save to the standard WAV file or for longer recording sessions you can save to an MP3 file (of various compressions) giving you lots of playback options. One of the power features allows for the tagging of your recorded files. This means that, during playback only, you can mark certain portions of your audio as areas of interest, and send these out into another file. This is a great function, because it allows you to play back the audio of, say, an hour long meeting, and tag only the portion during which your client agrees to triple your fee! This tagged file can then be saved separately into its own file, and saved, emailed, etc. A really cool side feature allows you to tag any appropriate file, not just your own recordings; you can use this to crop out snippets of your favorite MP3 file. It's not really a sound editor, but you can do a lot with this feature.
Figure 2: Tagging a portion of the audio.
Figure 3: List of tagged areas of sound file.
Figure 4: Exporting the tagged portion to a new file.
Can you Hear Me Now?
While the software is supposed to be able to let you save to an MP3 file, I had a difficulty with this.
There are two sets of settings for each file you record: file type (which translates into compression) and microphone sensitivity. As mentioned above, the file type means saving to a .WAV file for better quality, or to an MP3 file for longer but poorer quality files. Microphone sensitivity refers to the ability of the software to detect sounds away from the microphone, and to some extent to operate as a voice activated recorder. Both attempt to level out the microphone volume and make for a more even sounding playback. By adjusting sensitivity, you can have the software record sound only above a certain volume, etc.
When recording to a .WAV file, I got good results with both settings, but when I tried to record to an MP3 file, the sound was unusable. I used this software to record a meeting in a large council meeting chamber, and the sound file was very nearly unintelligible. Listening to it gave me a headache (and not just because it was a council meeting) because it was filled with fragments of words: the beginnings and/or ends of words were cut off, sentences were skipped, etc. Adjusting the microphone gain in the control panel never seems to be any help.
Figure 5: The software gives you the ability to choose standard and long play file types.
Look Ma! No Hands!
The software also has a scheduled recording feature, which would allow you to set a timer, and set recording to start automatically. This could be a really useful feature; for example, you arrive at you meeting five minutes early, and don't want to be bothered remembering to start the recorder when everyone else shows up. Just set the schedule for five minutes in the future, and then set it for the anticipated length of the meeting, and viola! You're set to go.
Figure 5: The recording scheduler claims to give you the ability to record unattended.
This feature comes in handy. Just set it and forget it, as they say on TV. However, I should caution that it may not be legal in your area to use this function to record a meeting without the participant’s knowledge.
Gotchas
Overall, this is a good package, with the only exception being the disappointing quality of the MP3 files. This is a serious flaw in an otherwise good product.
Where To Buy
The software can be downloaded from Handango or purchased for $19.95 (affiliate link).
Specifications
This program will work on any Pocket PC 2002 device – I do not know if the program will work Windows Mobile 2003 (I am still waiting for my HP 2215) :? . It takes 712 kb of memory.
Conclusions
While the program has a great interface and hardware button mapping, and a really useful file tagging feature, I was disappointed that my files saved as MP3s were not usable. Overall however, this will be a useful addition for those who need to extend the capabilities of the voice recorder.
