Aside from Audac­ity, does any­one know of a good (free) audio record­ing pro­gram for Win­dows (XPish… Media Cen­ter Edi­tion, actu­ally)? Only needs to do a sin­gle track, but I’m just not a huge fan of Audacity’s inter­face, and was mostly just curi­ous to see what else was out there.

And no, I haven’t aban­doned my Ubuntu behe­moth, it’s just that we’ve got a baby Shut­tle com­puter down­stairs that has much bet­ter qual­ity audio stuff going for it. The mic itself is slightly-but-not-much-better-than-the-average-PC-mic (it’s a now-discontinued Andrea prod­uct), which means you actu­ally can hear the dif­fer­ence in line noise. Just. Well, okay, more than just, it’s prob­a­bly the best cheap/free head­set mic I’ve ever used, but that still prob­a­bly isn’t say­ing huge amounts. Bah, what­ever… the point is, what­ever the sound­card I’ve got in my day-to-day com­puter (some C-Media thing) is crap and ridicu­lously noisy, and the Shuttle’s AC’97 is loads bet­ter (because it’s prob­a­bly about five years more recent than the sound card in here, and also because its out­put is dig­i­tal going to some Sony receiver that does things nicely enough. At least part of the prob­lem with this PC is that its out­put is lousy.)

So yeah. I’m using XP Media Cen­ter Edi­tion (I was plan­ning on post­ing pho­tos of the few-month-old box some­time, I promise! It just slipped past me/I couldn’t be bothered/It was down­stairs and I live at the other end of the house/You’ve all prob­a­bly seen these things before and it’s not really that exciting/It’s Dad’s toy not mine and I’m still vaguely con­vinced he shouldn’t have got it/Insert myr­iad other rea­sons for not blog­ging here.), and want to know what peo­ple who haven’t got money to spend on soft­ware they rarely use are using for occa­sional audio recording.

Slightly-crazy idea: Is Win­dows Movie Maker any good for record­ing audio? I recall you can use a com­men­tary track on that… I’m think­ing it’d be pos­si­ble just to throw in a blank screen and extend it for how­ever long I needed to record for. I’m a fan of not hav­ing to install more soft­ware, espe­cially on some­thing retarded and intended purely for… watch­ing TV (hah!) and doing other such crap. So yeah. Com­ments? Please? For once?

Yeah, I know when­ever I ask for com­ments I seem to get less than usual on posts… meh :P Fail­ing feed­back, I’ll give Movie Maker a go and if it’s too hor­ri­ble then Audac­ity it is.

Tags: Shuttle, Sony, Ubuntu, Windows