Recording continuous audio

March 19, 2007 8:15 AM

Is there any sound recording program for Windows that is designed to record continuously, such as for archiving police radio?

I live in a smallish city where we sometimes see police or fire truck activity going on (about the only excitement). The newspaper is kind of crappy and doesn't report on these things much, but the police scanner is a goldmine. I can't listen to it all the time, so I thought of just routing the audio to a sound file and accessing it when I need it.

I could just record with Audacity or Goldwave, but these programs just create one giant sound file, and you can't access it until the recording is finished. I figure there's got to be a program more suited to this purpose. Ideally it would create one new file every hour, and the currently-active file could be listened to anytime without disrupting the recording.

posted by chef_boyardee to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Are you listening over the web or are you hoping to wire up a standalone radio to your PC?

If you listen over the web then there is a myriad of audio recording software out there for recording skype conversations, one of them would probably fit your needs.
posted by fire&wings at 8:31 AM on March 19, 2007

There's a free voice activated program called Scanner Recorder.

Highly recommended, I've been using it with my various scanning rigs for years. The nicest thing is that you get the whole day compressed into a few minutes.
posted by fake at 8:31 AM on March 19, 2007

MP3DirectCut will do this and it's only a 500KB free download. It's the fastest mini editing, recording (direct to MP3 - any bitrate of your choice) and chopper I've found (on Windows.. no Mac equivalent which sucks). It will also split per hour or whatever.. but you can play stuff back even if it's still recording!
posted by wackybrit at 8:40 AM on March 19, 2007

I've used MixMP3 in the past for similar tasks. It will let you split files in a variety of ways, and if I recall you can also set it to record only when there is actually sound to record, which could save you from recording a lot of dead air.

The only possible downsides are that it's a command-line application and that the program is originally Russian, and the English docs aren't perfect.
posted by jjb at 10:29 AM on March 19, 2007

dbpoweramp is my favourite recording software for this sort of thing.
posted by tomble at 6:36 PM on March 19, 2007