Voice Recorder

[BarePaw]

I've been using the voice recorder on my iPaq to record lectures at school. I can only record about half an hour at a time before I have to stop and transfer the recording to the memory card. Some of my lectures go two hours, so this leads to 4 piece lecture recording with missing sections (assuming I don't fall asleep and forget to restart the recording). Is there a way to set the program to record directly to the memory card, or is there another program that can do this?

[Menneisyys]

I've been using the voice recorder on my iPaq to record lectures at school. I can only record about half an hour at a time before I have to stop and transfer the recording to the memory card. Some of my lectures go two hours, so this leads to 4 piece lecture recording with missing sections (assuming I don't fall asleep and forget to restart the recording). Is there a way to set the program to record directly to the memory card, or is there another program that can do this?

In Notes, in its List view (that is, don't open any document), choose Tools/Options, and choose the card to save directly onto in the "Save to" drop-down list.

However, if I were you, I'd use a decent MP3 recorder instead. There're two apps with excellent sound quality: NoteM and VITO. (The third well-known MP3 recorder, Resco, has very bad sound quality and storage card writing problems, so do not get it.)

Both apps have strengths and weaknesses. NoteM is free and consumes little power (not a CPU-intensive app), but lacks any "advanced" features. VITO, on the other hand, is commercial, consumes considerably more power (which is of extreme importance with prolonged recordings), but has tons of additonal features.

As for me, I've chosen NoteM; you should, however, evaluate VITO too to see if it suits your needs.

EDIT:

The links: Resco Audio Recorder: http://www.resco-net.com/audiorec.asp
VITO SoundExplorer 2005: http://vitotechnology.com/en/products/soundexplorer.html
NoteM: http://www.freewareppc.com/multimedia/notem.shtml

[Kati Compton]

Anyone know how to get the sound files *out* of the notes?

[Paul Martin]

Anyone know how to get the sound files *out* of the notes?

Kati,

Doesn't it just create a .wav file in your My Documents folder. You could copy out when you sync. It's been so long, I've forgotten.

[Darius Wey]

Doesn't it just create a .wav file in your My Documents folder. You could copy out when you sync. It's been so long, I've forgotten.

I think Kati's referring to audio embedded in an actual note, not just a normal audio recording, although I may be mistaken. Kati?

[Lex]

NoteM silenced my PPC speaker every time I played back a sound file with it. I've given up on it and bought Resco Audio Recorder. It works great for me. I only record to main memory. I'm no audiophile but the voice recording sound quality is great if you set it for any of the high quality settings. There are plenty of memory-saving settings at which sound quality is a trade-off. I can hear voice recordings very clearly at the memory saving settings I've chosen.

[Menneisyys]

I'm no audiophile but the voice recording sound quality is great if you set it for any of the high quality settings. There are plenty of memory-saving settings at which sound quality is a trade-off. I can hear voice recordings very clearly at the memory saving settings I've chosen.

It all depends on which codec you use. The MP3 codec has awful highs (meaning: complete lack of them), as long as quality modes (44 kHz sampling frequency) are concerned. OGG codecs just don't work on decent 400 MHz XScale machines (e.g., the iPAQ 2210) in 32/44.1 kHz sampling frequency modes, so they can't produce decent recordings either (because you need to use 22.5 kHz sampling rate, which severely degrades sound quality). There're some other built-in codecs too in Resco (especially Speex), but they don't produce as good sound quality as MP3.

Of course, this won't apply if you only use 11 kHz sampling frequency: even the MP3 codec in Resco will behave then OK. It's "just" at high-quality modes (44.1 kHz sampling frequency) that it has severely degraded sound quality / won't work at all on current PPC's because of the CPU requirements, compared to both VITO and NoteM.

[Menneisyys]

Anyone know how to get the sound files *out* of the notes?

There's AFAIK no existing tool for it; however, coding one is programmatically not complicated (if there is need, I can code it today evening) because the PWI format is very simple.

1, look for the Unicode string "VoiceNote.wav" in the file; if there is no (other) occurrence, quit
2, add 0x1032 to the position of the trailing "v" in it; seek to this position in the file
3, read up the size of the note (4 bytes in big-endian format; there's a 0x0055 before it)
4, extract the section starting just after these 4 bytes with the size just read to a separate file
5, go to step 1 for the next embedded audio note

[sheik]

There's AFAIK no existing tool for it; however, coding one is programmatically not complicated (if there is need, I can code it today evening) because the PWI format is very simple.

If you did code such a utility I suspect it would make plenty of people grateful.
I use NoteM now to record Cantonese samples for my website, but when I first started using Pocket PCs I used the normal note recorder, expecting to be able to extract the WAVs. I remember being most annoyed when I couldn't!

/\dam

[Lex]

Pardon the slight OT but Menneisyys do you have any idea why NoteM would silence the PPC speaker system-wide immediately following playback of any sound file? Exit NoteM, speaker is muted. Developer will not answer email. Many thanks.

[Menneisyys]

There's AFAIK no existing tool for it; however, coding one is programmatically not complicated (if there is need, I can code it today evening) because the PWI format is very simple.

If you did code such a utility I suspect it would make plenty of people grateful.
I use NoteM now to record Cantonese samples for my website, but when I first started using Pocket PCs I used the normal note recorder, expecting to be able to extract the WAVs. I remember being most annoyed when I couldn't!

/\dam

OK, will try it today evening; depends on my work (now, I'm heavily buried into into Oracle 10g's and have no free time for coding & testing.)

[BarePaw]

Thanks for the help. I used NoteM during class today and it worked great. Sleeping through class will be much easier now.

[Menneisyys]

If you did code such a utility I suspect it would make plenty of people grateful.
I use NoteM now to record Cantonese samples for my website, but when I first started using Pocket PCs I used the normal note recorder, expecting to be able to extract the WAVs. I remember being most annoyed when I couldn't!

/\dam

Please read http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=351079

[GSmith]

Menneisyys is certainly the expert in this area. I've compiled (but not tested) a list of other options for recording on the Pocket PC (some cheap, some expensive), see

http://feederreader.pocketcasting.com/viewtopic.php?t=34

Comments happily accepted!

Greg Smith
Author, FeederReader - The Pocket PC *direct* RSS text, audio, video, podcasts
www.FeederReader.com - Download on the Road

[Menneisyys]

Menneisyys is certainly the expert in this area. I've compiled (but not tested) a list of other options for recording on the Pocket PC (some cheap, some expensive), see

http://feederreader.pocketcasting.com/viewtopic.php?t=34

Comments happily accepted!


Cool :)

You may also want to check out the following pages:

http://www.pocketpcmag.com/newsl_jkwg/JKWG_02-22-05.htm / http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/index.php?action=expand,37799
http://discussion.brighthand.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118270

and

http://discussion.brighthand.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118288 / http://www.firstloox.org//forums/showthread.php?t=3884