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Freeware for Windows -- Where Did It Go?
Talahamut asks: "The other day, I was planning on recording a radio show by running my stereo's output into my PC. Oooh, that sucks - WinXP's Sound Recorder limits you to 60 sec. recordings. Oh well, I'll just go online and grab a little WAV recorder. 30 minutes later, I'm frustrated because all I find is crippleware (time-limited, of course...) that records every format under the sun from any sound stream imaginable. What happened to the small home-brewed Windows utilities that used to be so easy to find online years ago? All the freeware sites I checked had nothing but commercial crippleware. Is there no place to find simple programs like that anymore?"
Try going to www.download.com and searching under programs with freeware licenses.
I guess most hobbists have moved to GNU/* and *BSD.
When making free-as-in-cost, they may as well be doing free-as-in-freedom. And working with other developers that share code is nice.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
www.nonags.com
I use http://www.versiontracker.com to find all my software... I found these gems all freeware for you. Pocket voice recorder Sound recorder And the total search with "shareware" is Hope this helps
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
http://www.pricelessware.org/
Ever heard of TUCOWS? You can search for software there, and order by license.
AudioGrabber 1.83 is freeware, and is rated 5 stars. I used to use it to rip CDs, but the description claims it can do exactly what you need.
It may be a little bit overkill for recording a radio program (although I've used the software for that before), but why not try the (open source) Audacity?
http://freshmeat.net/projects/audacity/
Freshmeat.net lists MANY software applications as they are released, and as good search capabilities if you login.
Audacity is one of the best non-complex sound recorders and mixers going, using wxWidgets works and looks right under linux, windows and probably more (you look).
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
It just looks that way because of a bad, bad, bad UI.
Record 60 seconds of silence. Now save them as a file, and import it into the current sample. Voila! a 2-minute sample, which you can record over. Repeat as necessary.
who here hasn't written something like this 3x already?! :-)
Petzold's book is a good starting point...
This one is classified as: "Error between keyboard and chair". It's resolved by yelling: "Learn to use the internet, dumbass".
See the selection of freeware audiorecorders on Snapfiles.
Lack of Windows freeware, my ass.
foobar2000 and foo_record. Can play and record pretty much every audio format imaginable (although you probably want to find the 0.7 diskwriters until they're all ported to the new 0.8 API.. ask me if you need a hand, but you should be able to find stuff on the very useful forum) in 64 bit float precision. It can apply software DSP's, perform tagging operations at a level which puts the likes of Tag & Rename to shame, and is more configurable than any other audio player out there (because it's more than just an audio player ;)
:)
Most of the components are BSD licensed too. And don't let the default look put you off; it's skinnable and you can go a *long* way with nice formatting strings.
I could go on, but I should really stop gushing. I've successfully converted quite a few peeps by doing this though, so there must be some truth in it
http://www.freewarehome.com/
http://www.nonags.com
http://www.tucows.com
and then:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://www.dago.pmp.com.pl/messer/
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
AnalogX.com has some pretty good software. http://www.analogx.com/contents/download.htm
Having just experienced the same need, I googled for "windows open source wav record" and instantly had pages of free and/or open source offerings for windows.
The top of the list was http://www.vorbis.com/software.psp, which pointed me towards Audacity, which I had already used under Debian (its nice to see open source projects going cross-platform).
This was less than 5 minutes. Google gives you exactly what you ask for, after all....
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
If you're using Windows, you should probably be using all of these programs (if you need them). Most of them are pretty stable and mature.
Audacity - Sound editing (so this post is on-topic!)
Mozilla FireFox - Web browsing.
The Gimp - graphics/photo editing
Sodipodi - Vector graphics (SVG) editing. It's no Illustrator, but the basics are there, and they're pretty nice.
OpenOffice - Not quite ready to replace Word/Excel/PPT, but it's great if you (or your employer/university) haven't already shelled out for Office.
FileZilla - FTP client
Gaim - AOL Instant Messenger client
PuTTY - ssh client
There's a bit more elaboration and links on my blog.
Try this
Stepvoice recorder
http://www.stepvoice.com
It records almost any sound source directly into MP3. You can also define quality of the recording.
Best of all, it's only 230k!
Excellent Freeware Site
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeeware/ (used to be webattack.com)
I used to be addicted to freeware and this was one of my favorite places to get a fix.
All the software is well categorized.
I can often find what I'm looking for here.
http://www.nonags.com is good too.
Tod
If you are still looking for an audio recording app check out the windows port of Audacity. It has reat sound quality, mp3 and ogg output, Multi track, 32-bit floating point sound files, etc.
I Don't Work Here
ScanRec is one I've found rather useful. It isn't an end-all/be-all recorder, but it does have a rather useful feature. It was created with a VOX control originally to be used for recording ham sessions. So, it would not record constantly, but only when anybody brodcast. It will create a log file detailing what times it did the recordings. Anyway, I've used it for radio/TV stuff in the past, and I've had few problems with it (other than recording in a format that Media Player didn't really like.
use WinAmp, with it's bundled Disk-Writer plugin.
Probably over half of the programs that I run on my Windows machines are GNU or open source programs (Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, GIMP, grep, awk, sed, and even things like Bash). There are very few major GNU/Linux programs that don't run fine under windows these days either because they were written to be portable in the first place or because CYGWIN does a pretty decent job of emulating the unix libraries.
I see someone already mentioned Audacity, but I also wanted to mention that Exact Audio Copy will do exactly what you want, despite primarily being a cd ripping tool.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
There is a fascinating article about the effectiveness of crippling shareware versus relying on goodwill at http://www.scrawlsoft.com/products/common/hardnose .html.
The short summary: He did a study using a Windows shareware program. Upon installation, it randomly chose whether to be crippleware or simply remind the user to pay when starting and quitting the program, with a 50% chance of each. It did this in such a way that reinstalling wouldn't randomly choose again, so most people didn't even realize there were two "versions". The crippled version sold over five times as many copies.
Granted, this is a single example and may not be representative of all situations, but it's the best study I'm aware of so far. It puts the "people who will buy it will pay for it anyway, don't piss people off by crippling the product" position in serious doubt, at least in my mind.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I find Total Recorder very useful too. Just paying $12 for it is easier than trying to find free programs to do the same thing. What's your time worth? I searched for weeks to find something that would record streaming radio broadcasts on Windows (Linux can do this all by itself, with a few command line untilities piped together). Anyway, Total Recorder was the only thing I could find, free or not.
A problem with developing this kind of software is needing proprietary libraries, etc. So virtually all software of this type is non-free. Total Recorder gets around this by recording the output of the sound card. Methinks Java could be used for this and it could be cross-platform, but so far no one's bothered.
www.OnlyTheBestFreeware.com
PricelessWare is better. Actually, I think that's the best site for Windows freeware on the web - everything is reviewed.
Freeware OGG to WAV decoder?
I have to assume you're doing this in windows, since under Linux, if you had the ogg libraries you'd already have a decoder and be doing this with a simple shell script.
So, take just about any decent audio player (such as winamp) that reads Ogg Vorbis and use it to write out WAV files instead of playing to the soundcard (on Winamp it's called the "Nullsoft disk-writer pluging"). Problem solved; you make a playlist, press play & a few seconds later, you're finished.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Did you try Jet Audio Basic?
See download.com
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Hear is an easier one.
record any thing
Press Ctrl+C
Press and Hold Ctrl+V until it's as long as you like.