I have been asked by a couple of people how to extend the recording time from the default 60 seconds, so here is how I do it. There may be other methods

Extending Windows Recorder, recording time.
1. Set up the recorder for the desired file format eg CD Quality (44.1KHz, 16Bit Stereo) using File/properties/Convert Now and in the Sound Selection window, change the name to CD. Or, if you want to customise your format, then use the 'Format:' and 'Attribute:' options in the window. Click OK twice, when finished.

2. Start the recorder by pressing the Red button and allow it to run for the full 60 seconds, without any audio input.

3. When the recording is finished, you will have a 1 minute blank recording file. Save this file in an appropriate folder and call it say ' Blank01.wav' (File/Save as...)

4. Click on the double Left arrow to return the recorder pointer to the 0.00

5. Click on Edit/Insert File and when the Insert File window opens, navigate to where you saved the 'Blank01.wav' file. Click on the file and then Open. You should now see that the 'Length' window in the Sound Recorder shows 120.00 seconds.

6. Repeat step 5 to add 1 minute per step, for the required file length say 5 minutes and then save the file again, this time as say 'Blank05'

The Windows Sound recorder will now record for 5 minutes. When you make a recording, make sure that you save it using a different name, since the 'Blank05' file can then be used to initialise the recorder for other sessions. When you wish to start a recording session another time, there are two ways to do this.

a. Start the sound recorder and then load the 'Blank05' file (or other if you have made a longer one) File/Open/ navigate....etc. The recorder will then be initialised for the period set by the 'Blankxx.wav' file.

b. This process can be automated by creating a shortcut on your desktop. There are several way to do this - here is one of them :

1. Right click on a blank area on the desktop and move the mouse pointer to 'New' and across to Shortcut and click.

2. When the 'Create Shortcut' window appears, type the following in the 'Command line' box :

C:\WINDOWS\SNDREC32.EXE c:\folderpath\Blankxx.wav ( NOTE: there is a space between 'EXE' and 'c:' )
where 'folderpath' is the path to the folder where the 'Blankxx' file is stored and 'Blankxx' is the name of the file which defines the required length of recording.

3. Click the 'Next' button and then enter an appropriate name for the shortcut - say 'Record05' for a 5 minute file and then click on the Finish button.

4. The shortcut should then appear on your Desktop.

Double clicking on the shortcut will open the Sound Recorder with the length set according to the file entered in the shortcut details. For different lengths of recording , you could create additional shortcuts on the desktop. This can be done by following the above procedure or by copying and pasting the existing shortcut on the desktop and just editing the name of the 'Blankxx.wav' file in the Properties option of the copied shortcut. You should then rename the shortcut of course.

If you have any questions, just ask.

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Willum

[This message has been edited by Bill Norrie (edited 09-16-2002).]

just out of interest what happens if you use windows sound recorder normally at the 60 sec setting. Do you still get the hard drive problems as with audio recorder a couple of minutes into the song?

can you not record a 5 minute silent (zero input) wave file in one go with audio recorder?

does audio recorder work any better if you load it first with a 5 minute silent wave file (always 'saving as' the recording as something else)?

it looks possible that loading a silent wave file is just reserving a contiguous section of hard drive reserved for saving the recording, pointing to swap file/defrag/speed/access time possible explanation of this problem???

I used to use sound recorder and to make it longer I decreased the speed once. this done with a blank 60 sec. made it 120 sec. then i started recording. It worked ok for me this way.
Tony

Hi Alec, If you just use the 60 second length, no problem never showed. However, the distortion problem only showed up after about 1 minute, by which time the Windows recorder had timed out. That was my main reason for extending the time period to do a comparison with the Panasonic recorder.
You cannot record a file greater than 60 seconds with the windows recorder, as supplied and normally configured, as installed. The process is a little long winded but only has to be done once - well for each length and format of silent file anyway. You could just create say a 10 minute file and then when the recording was finished, you can stop the recording and move the 'end of file' marker by using Edit/Delete after current position before saving the file, thus chopping out the silent remaining part at the end of the file.
I haven't tried loading a blank file into the Panasonic Audio recorder to initialise - good idea! I'll try it tomorrow and let you know what happens.

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Willum

[This message has been edited by Bill Norrie (edited 09-17-2002).]

Thanks Bill, Alec and Tony for your help. Yes Bill it is rather long winded but I shall give it a try.

Cheers

Len C.

As suggested by Alec, I carried out a test on the Panasonic Audio Recorder, to determine whether preloading a blank file, before recording, made any difference to the distortion problem, which I experience, on one of my PCs. (The dreaded Go Back was not installed on this PC and a Defrag operation was carried out overnight)
I recorded a blank 2 minute file, stopped the recorder and then without saving, started another recording. However, a window then appeared asking if the Untitled recording should be saved and if No is chosen, then the recorder just seems to discard the original file and start recording from scratch. If this second recording is played back, the slight distortion which I observed earlier, is still present in the form of break-up, so no difference there I also noticed that the hard disc activity was still greater than when using the Windows Sound Recorder.
If I save the silent file and then load it back into the recorder then select Record, the result is just the same. So it would seem that it is not possible to reserve disc space, by preloading a blank file.

I tried Tony's method of extending the Windows Sound Recorder recording time and it does work OK. However, if you use this method, every time you start the recorder from scratch, you will have to let it run for a period, before you can use the 'Decrease Speed' function, under the 'Effects' option, since the default length at start up is 0.00seconds. Furthermore, on start up, the recording format defaults to 22.050Hz, 8 Bit, Mono which is not very suitable for transfer of KN7000 sound to CD. So, you have to reconfigure the format when you first start the recorder.
If you use the way I suggested in the above post, then everything is initialised automatically, using the desktop shortcuts and one mouse double click. I realise that it takes a bit of setting up initially, but you only do it once!

One point which I mentioned in my earlier response to Alec - if your recording takes less time than the pre-loaded Blankxx.wav file, this will leave some silent space at the end of your recording. If you just save the entire recording to disc, then the silent space will also be saved, making the file unnecessarily long. The way round this is to select 'Edit' and then click on the 'Delete After Current Position' option. Make sure that the Current Cursor position is at the end of your recording. A slightly unfortunate side effect of this procedure, is that it resets the maximum recording length, to that of the file which you have just 'chopped' . Not a big problem - just close the recorder window and open it again using the shortcut, if you wish to do another recording.

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Willum

I have recorded using the panasonic usb audio driver to the supplied audio recorder, to sound forge, to cool edit pro, to goldwave and to cakewalk sonar audio, and also tried the wave editors that come supplied with Nero and Easy CD Creator, all with perfect results. I deliberately chose my least specified laptop for the tests rather than the more powerful machines. Haven't used windows recorder for years because never needed to, and don't like it. There must be something in your configuration, driver install, or hardware to explain your problem. Have you no wave editor with your cd writer application, or other wave program you can try for recording? This blank file business seems such a bind.

Hi Alec, as I said before, it only occurs with one of my PCs and I just won't use that one for recording from KN7000. I'm sure you are right about it being down to configuration of the particular PC but I've spent enough time at present, trying to find out what's causing it. Maybe I'll revisit it later. I've got Goldwave and used it extensively for transferring much of my LP collection to CD and it does a great job. I did try it on the 'suspect' PC with the KN7000, and still had a little bit of distortion when using it with temporary storage to Disc. It was fine when I changed the temporary storage to use RAM instead.

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Willum

I have an older pc with just 48 ram. When I record on sound recorder anything longer than 120 sec. later when I open it to hear it, it about kills my pc trying to open it. I guess sound recorder uses a lot of ram or something. Upon opening over 120 sec, recording it actually takes about 45 seconds and my pc grinds like crazy and almost wants to freeze up. But I can instantly open an mp3 10 times the size. This tells me that the sound recorder for windows is a poor unit, and makes me wonder if it takes more memory or higher processor than for most programs if it is large.
tony

Hi Sparky, Windows Sound recorder produces a .wav file and depending on the configuration ie Sampling frequency, Bit density and mono/Stereo it can take up quit a bit of memory. A typical CD quality recording using 44.1KHz sampling rate, 16 Bit resolution and Stereo sound, will use just over 10 Megabytes of memory per minute. You didn't say what configuration your 120 second recording used but if it was CD quality I should imagine very little of it would be stored in RAM, if any! Remember that Windows needs quite a bit of RAM to run itself, even without any applications active. With that small amount of RAM, the PC is most probably using 'Virtual Memory' for much of the time and of course that means lots of hard disc activity, since that is where your virtual ram is located. So I'm not surprised that you pc 'Goes Crazy'
You really need more than 48Mb to do any serious work.
I used to regard the Windows Sound recorder as a bit of a 'toy' until recently. Given it's limitations, it is still capable of producing very good results.
As far as playing an MP3 file is concerned, it must be using less resources to play.

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Willum

no digital cd quality wave recording will work with 48 MB Ram, I'm afraid. With older windows 64 MB may just get by with a squeak, with the newer windows you need 128 MB just to keep windows happy. For XP pro I would be looking at 512 MB Ram. A newer fast hard drive helps, there are many variables, with whole books and articles written on hard drive recording. It's only in the past few years where home pcs have got to the stage where they can easily do it without specialist tweaking. Yet you can get perfect results on a 4 year old laptop too.