Software on your computer
Recording directly onto your computer can be useful if you are mainly recording yourself, but it won’t be mobile unless you have a laptop. With the audio file already on your computer you can easily save it where you want it or send it to someone else, using email or other file transfer options.
You may already have recording software on your computer, such as Windows Sound Recorder. If not, you can download free software from the web – Audacity is a good example.
You’ll need a sound card and a detachable or built-in microphone.
Windows Sound Recorder
What you need to know
- Easy to use – just click on the control with the round button and talk!
- Very basic but quick – the controls are like those on a CD player or tape recorder.
- Likely to be included in your PC software (so you don’t have to buy or load anything).
- Use it to paste audio into other applications (e.g. Word, PowerPoint).
- Good for your own quick notes and reminders but not if you want to edit. (Tip: you could edit the saved file in Microsoft’s Movie Player or Audacity).
How you use it
- Find the audio recorder in Programs / Accessories / Entertainment (depending on your version of the Microsoft operating system – you may have to search about).
- Open it from your computer desktop and familiarise yourself with the main
controls (e.g. round button to record). Take a look at the Help section if you’re keen to try things like inserting into other applications.
- Record yourself talking: Select Record, when you’ve finished choose Stop.
- Play and listen to your recording.
- You can only save as a WAV file – which needs converting if you want it to play on a mobile device. MP3 is probably the best option– you can convert it using something like Audacity (which is free and open source).
Audacity
What you need to know
- Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is cross platform so should work on any computer.
- It’s easy to use – the controls are like those on a CD player or tape recorder.
- You can generate audio files in different formats (MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis).
- If you plan to use Audacity to edit your iTunes files visit the Editing iTunes files page for additional information.
How you use it
- Download Audacity
and follow the instructions to install the software on your computer.
- Open Audacity from your computer desktop, and familiarise yourself with the main controls: Skip to start, Play, Record, Pause, Stop, Skip to end. Take a look at the Help section if you want to find out more.
- Record yourself talking: Start with Record and when you’ve finished, Stop.
- Play and listen to your recording: Select Skip to start, Play, and then Stop.
- You can save your file as a ‘Project’ in Audacity if you want to edit it with this software later. You’ll need to export the file as a WAV, OGG or MP3 format to play on a portable audio device.
- We’d recommend MP3 as it is widely used and enables you to easily share the file with others. There is a slight drawback: to export your file in MP3 format you’ll need to download and use the free LAME encoder. Instructions to use this are at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ . But it’s worth it.
- Select File … Export as MP3 and you then simply need to title and tag (or describe) the file – a dialogue box will enable you to do this.
- You may want to compress your audio file to make the file size smaller. You can use Audacity to set different configurations to compress audio if you need to.
- Transfer your audio file to your portable audio device, such as your MP3 player.
Related links
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