1. Preliminaries

  • Make sure your sound devices are working properly before you start.
  • There are no controls in the Sound editors for selecting and monitoring while actually recording. You can only play back the finished recording.
  • In the days of recording to tape, there was often a switch to toggle between monitoring the input and what had just been recorded. The closest I’ve seen to that is an external pre-amp and sound system, where you can toggle between the input and what is going down the USB connection to the computer, while listening through earphones connected to the same box.

2. Monitoring input during recording

  • Exactly how you monitor a recording will depend on which sound devices you have and how they’re organized.
  • The standard computer sound systems don’t usually allow toggling between the input and the recording, while actually recording. The general case is to use the Windows Volume control, and set it to the input to listen while while recording, then switch over to the playback source once the recording is finished.

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The Windows Volume Control from Windows XP
  • You will presumably listen to Microphone or Line-in while monitoring during recording.
  • Then you’ll need to set Wave as source in order to listen to the finished recording.
  • Then switch back again to monitor a new recording…

3. Playing back the finished recording

  • Click the Play button to listen to the latest recording.
  • Stereo recordings are played back in stereo.
  • The progress bar shows if you have a recording.
  • The [Esc] key and [Tab] key are not active in the Sound recorders (ongoing play can’t be interrupted). Playback continues until it reaches the end of the recording.
  • The longest possible recording duration (when the progress bar reaches the end of its space) is fixed by the size of the recording Sound buffer.
  • The default Sound buffer size is 20MB. That might be large enough to give you a LongSound object rather than a Sound object, depending on your computer resources. If you make the Sound buffer much larger, you probably will get a LongSound object. This doesn’t affect playback here, that will still work.
  • However, a LongSound object does mean you can’t do Save to list or Save to list & close. Instead, save the recording as a sound file from the File menu. See also Sound objects and LongSound objects.