Chapter 18. Recording Simple Audio

In This Chapter:

• Understand how recorded digital audio can be helpful
• Learn about Sound Recorder’s format and file quality
• Get sound to your computer
• See which microphone works best
• Make a test recording
• Review helpful recording tips

Windows Vista includes a small application called Sound Recorder that enables you to make recordings and save them as digital audio files on your disk. The program doesn’t have lots of bells and whistles, but it’s stable and provides a reliable way to record sound that you can use for narration, note taking, and recording other sounds and events that you want to save digitally.

To record audio with Sound Recorder, all you need is a source for the sound. That might be a direct cable you run from a stereo or a microphone plugged into your computer to record your voice. Sound Recorder has been around since the early days of Windows. Surprisingly, in Windows Vista, Microsoft removed rather then added features to the Sound Recorder application. What appears in Windows Vista is lean and mean, and this short chapter explains how you can use Sound Recorder to get the most out of your digital audio.

Why Audio

In addition to the obvious need to add sound over videos and slideshows, you might want to record sound and save the recording to your computer for a variety of reasons. Consider these possibilities:

• Record meetings and lectures—With your laptop you can record meetings and lectures instead of taking copious handwritten notes. By recording the meeting or lecture, you can listen better and concentrate on what’s going on. Later, your recorded audio file serves as a backup if you want to refer to something that was said.
• Record quick notes—With your laptop, you’ll never need a miniature tape or voice recorder. Laptops eliminated the need for portable CD players, DVD players, and pocket organizers years ago and now you can toss your portable recorder, too. Your laptop might be larger than all those devices but you need to carry only the laptop now, instead of carrying your laptop and all those other devices when you travel.
• Record speech for emails—Say hello to friends and family when you travel. Record audio files and send those files as email attachments.
• Record vinyl records—Get an appropriate cable from your local electronics store and you’re ready to use Sound Recorder to record those old vinyl records you no longer listen to because of the hassle of playing them on a turntable. Put the files on your PC and then record them to a CD so that you can listen to them in your car on your next cross-country trip.
• Record audio for web pages—How can you put your voice into digital audio files that you want to send to the web or a blog? Sound Recorder works well for doing just that and if you create Podcasts you can drop your Sound Recorder files right onto your site’s Podcast launcher.

Sound Recorder is adequate for these kinds of jobs. Anything more would be overkill and would create high-quality sound files that would quickly consume disk space and would not load fast with a web page. Worse, sending a huge audio file in a high-quality format would clog some email systems, causing them to reject the emails you send with those kinds of attachments.

If you want a full-blown, PC-based recording studio, you’ll certainly need something other than Sound Recorder. Programs such as Cakewalk and Composer do a good job and you can connect your computer to good recording equipment that will turn sound into high-quality digital files before sending those files to your computer for processing. Sound Recorder doesn’t compete with those high-end programs and your computer doesn’t compete with the high-end hardware. Instead, Sound Recorder is meant to give you quick access to simple digital audio recordings.

Perhaps in a future operating system Microsoft will include a sound recorder in Media Player. As it stands now, Media Player cannot record audio; it can only play audio and it plays audio very well indeed.

About Sound Recorder’s Format and Quality

Sound Recorder records in the Windows Media Audio format. When you save a recording, the digital audio file has these properties:

• Filename Extension—.wma
• Sound Quality Bit Rate—96Kbps
• Size of Audio File—11KB per second of recording; a five-minute recording consumes about 3.5MB of disk space
• Sample Rate—44.1kHz; comparable to a good quality, portable tape recorder using high quality tape

If you run a Windows Vista operating system with the letter N in the title, such as the Windows Home Basic N, Media Player is not included in your system; you can download Windows Media Player from Microsoft.com if you want to use Windows Media Player on such systems. Without Media Player, the player for which .wma files were designed, you might not be able to play back .wma files easily. Therefore, for N-based operating systems, Microsoft saves Sound Recorder files in the WAVE form audio format with these properties:

• Filename Extension—.wav
• Sound Quality Bit Rate—96Kbps
• Size of Audio File—1,378K per second of recording; a five-minute recording consumes about 51MB of disk space
• Sample Rate—44.1kHz; comparable to a good quality, portable tape recorder using high quality tape

As you can see, Media Player’s .wma files are compressed and consume far less disk space than file formats of similar quality, such as WAVE files. That is perhaps why so many MP3 players (the iPod excepted) now support the .wma format along with MP3.

Physically Getting Sound to Your Computer

Sound Recorder requires a sound card and speakers (or a headset plugged into your computer sound card’s output jack). Some PCs have jacks for a microphone and headset or speakers in the front of the computer as well as in the back. You’ll have to locate yours.

If you want to record your voice or meeting and lecture notes, your laptop might have a built-in microphone already. The recording quality of a built-in microphone will not be as good as using a separate microphone, so you should consider using a standalone microphone for all your sound recording. Some PC microphones use a plug that connects to your sound card or front panel microphone-in jack and some PC microphones are USB-based.

Some microphones work as handhelds or can be placed on your desktop, whereas others, such as the one in Figure 18.1, are headset based. Also, webcams often have microphones built into them if you happen to have a webcam attached to your computer. A headset microphone includes one or two earphones as well as a microphone that wraps around to your mouth area. A headset microphone creates a much better recording of your voice than a separate microphone that you hold near your mouth.

Figure 18.1. A headset-based microphone provides far better sound recording quality than a standalone microphone that you hold or place on a table.

Obviously, your recording needs dictate the type of microphone you use. A headset cannot record ambient sounds around the room that you would need for recording lectures and meetings.

If you connect a stereo cable from a stereo, television, or other electronic device into your computer’s line-in or microphone-in jack, you can use Sound Recorder to record the sound. Don’t rely on Sound Recorder for high-quality music recording even if you are sending a high-quality signal from a good stereo to your computer. The recorded sound file properties shown in the previous section for Sound Recorder’s .wma or .wav files determine the highest quality possible; the sound source doesn’t determine Sound Recorder’s quality.

Introducing Sound Recorder

Sound Recorder serves as one of the best ways to test your computer’s microphone and sound quality even if you’re using your microphone for something else. Suppose that you are anxious to try out Windows Vista’s speech recognition technology or want to make phone calls from your computer to others with computer-based phone technologies such as eBay’s Skype calling (see www.Skype.com). Plug in your microphone and start Sound Recorder to create a sample and listen to ensure that your microphone and sound levels are accurate.

Sound Recorder provides instant feedback that it’s hearing sound. It does this through a visual display that shows you a moving, green light that varies with volume and pitch. If you’ve ever seen a graphic equalizer on a stereo system, Sound Recorder’s visual sound gauge works something like that (although not as finely tuned). Look at Figure 18.2 to see a recording in session.

Figure 18.2. The louder the sound and the higher the pitch of what you record, the wider Sound Recorder’s sound display gets.

As you can see, Sound Recorder isn’t fancy. It doesn’t need to be fancy.

Making a Test Recording

If you have a microphone or line-in jack set up and you want to try Sound Recorder, you can do so by following these steps:

1. Start Sound Recorder from the Windows menu’s Accessories option. The only control on Sound Recorder’s small window is the Start Recording button.
2. Click Start Recording and speak into your microphone. As you speak, Sound Recorder’s green recording bar moves to the right to indicate volume level. If the volume is too great, you can back up from your microphone or speak softer. If your microphone seems to work but is not loud enough, your microphone’s recording level might be set too low; you can adjust the volume in your Control Panel.

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   By the Way

   If your recording source is a stereo jack, you might have to turn down the output from your stereo considerably before Sound Recorder can record at a reasonable volume.

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   If your microphone is plugged in but no sound appears to be coming from it, you should check the Sound dialog box, available through the Control Panel’s Hardware and Sound group, to ensure that Windows Vista is set to recognize your microphone.

   Select your microphone from the list of devices and then click the Properties button and click the Levels tab to display the Levels dialog box shown in Figure 18.3. Drag the microphone slider to the right to increase the microphone’s volume. You might have to adjust the volume several times before arriving at a good level. When you get to a good microphone level, you’ll rarely have to adjust the level in the future. If your recording level is still too low, the Other tab usually displays a MIC Boost option you can check to add volume to your microphone input level.

   Figure 18.3. If your microphone recording level isn’t high enough, you might have to adjust the level from your Control Panel’s Sound dialog box.

   

3. To temporarily stop recording, click the Stop Recording button and click Cancel when the Save As dialog box appears. You can resume the recording by clicking the Resume Recording button.
4. When finished recording, click Stop Recording. Sound Recorder displays the Save As dialog box shown in Figure 18.4.

   Figure 18.4. When you finish recording your message, save your audio recording and specify a name for the .wma (or .wav) file.

   

5. The Save As dialog box does more than specify your digital audio file’s name. You can add an artist and album tag. This might be useful when you are recording old LP records from a turntable so that you can listen to your records electronically. The artist and album details will appear in Media Player when you play the recording there, and you can specify further details (such as your star rating preference) about the song when it arrives in Media Player.

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   Did you Know?

   If you’re not recording record albums or other type of stereo but are recording meeting notes or dictating audio you want to record, you should consider filling in the Artist information field. For the Album Title field, only add a note that describes the recording. This way you’ll have more than just a filename to locate the recording in the future. To enter these details, click the Artist and the Album Title fields and replace the placeholder text that appears with more specific and descriptive information about your recording.

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   Before clicking the Save button, you can click the breadcrumbs at the top of the dialog box’s address area to find a disk location where you want to store your recording if you don’t want to store the recording in the default Documents location.

   If you click the Browse Folders button, your Save As dialog box expands to include far more fields, including a star rating that you can give your recording like the one shown in Figure 18.5. The more information you save with your recording at the time you make it, the more accurate your sound file information will be. It’s often difficult to go back a week or more later and remember, based solely on the filename you gave them, what several digital recordings were about.

   As soon as you save the file, all the descriptive data you attached to the recording in the Save As dialog box is available to Media Player and other Explorer programs that display files.

   Figure 18.5. Expand the Save As dialog box to enter more labeling information about your recording.

   

6. Click Save to save your recording. The Sound Recorder resets and displays a Start Recording button again in case you want to start a new recording.

Simple Recording Tips You Can Use

Audio professionals will tell you that most people, when speaking in a microphone, do it badly. People practically kiss the device by holding it too closely or behave as though they’re afraid of it by keeping the microphone too far away. No doubt you’ve seen this happen on TV when someone in an audience is handed a microphone.

In addition, amateur recorders tend to underestimate how much the sound around them, the ambient sound, can contribute to background buzzing and distractions that can impair the overall quality of the recording. For example, if you place your microphone too close to your PC itself, you might pick up the hum of the computer’s power supply and internal fans. With that in mind, try these tips for best results:

• Position your microphone a few inches from your mouse. This is true for both handheld microphones and headset microphones. It’s often best when your mouth and the microphone are not in direct alignment or you will record the pops in your breathing.
• Don’t place your microphone too close to your PC speakers, telephone, or monitor. You might get a low, humming interference or feedback whine if you do.
• Rheostats and fluorescent lights can produce some noisy interference when recording.
• If the microphone has its own volume control, start with its volume turned to a medium level.
• Turn off or close any programs that beep or otherwise play sounds (such as the tone that plays when new email arrives or when you receive an instant message).
• Take a moment to check the background sound level in the room where you record. Try to eliminate any extra sounds.
• Plan to make a few test recordings before you try for the real thing. Try different microphone levels and positions to see which work best.

Sound Recorder might not record the highest quality sound, but you don’t need to hamper it further by violating some of these recording tips. By keeping these tips in mind, you help to ensure that whatever you record is playable when you want to listen to your recording later.

Chapter Wrap-Up

A microphone adds an important dimension to a computer. With Sound Recorder, you can record web or email audio files. Take your laptop with you to lectures or meetings and record the event to reduce the amount of note-taking you would otherwise have to do.

Although Sound Recorder is simple, that’s also its beauty. For reliable and quick recordings, nothing is easier to use. You’ll be creating your own sound files quickly. If you don’t have costly recording software, you can even use Sound Recorder to record your vinyl record collection that’s been gathering dust for the past decade or longer.

Moving from audio to video, the next chapter explores Movie Maker, one of the most fun applications in Windows Vista. When you see what you can do with Movie Maker you will feel like a Hollywood producer.