somme1916 said:
I can appreciate what you are saying.
However you have totally lost me re the "hours of dead air" & "Recording lots of silence between conversations".
If you cannot do what other radio control software does re recording audio in an orderly fashion & without the "lots of silence" & "hours of dead air" that's fine. A man needs to know his limitations.
But to say that's all one will get , the above stated limitations , with recording audio from a scanner is flat out wrong. I've been doing it for quite sometime with a 996t & radio software.
Now as far as mp3 format. It just seem's odd to me that , for just one of many examples , Scanner Recorder a freeware pgm has used mp3 format option(s) for years. So I'm sorry I do not buy that excuse.
It's fairly obvious you do not plan to update your Win500 recording options to present day usage requirements & that's obviously your choice. But to not do it for reasons stated is...unfortunate.
First, MP3... MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 is a patented encoding method. Any software, hardware, etc. that encodes in the MP3 format needs to "get permission" from the patent holder(s). Thomson/Fraunhofer will sell me a license for $2.50 per unit, minimum $15,000 per calendar year (payable in advance). If I buy such a license, I can include their patented (see
http://www.mp3licensing.com/patents/index.html for a list of applicable patents worldwide) methods in the software I sell.
If someone includes MP3 encoding or decoding in their product, but doesn't reach some kind of licensing agreement with the patent holder(s), they're potentially guilty of "patent infringement". I really don't want to risk the (small?) chance that I'll get sued. If the "big boys" (Microsoft, Apple, etc.) see fit to pay the royalties to include MP3 encoders/decoders in their software, it seems to me that it would be a very bad idea to include MP3 encoding in my own software without paying those royalties - something I cannot, at present, afford to do.
Google "MP3 patents" or "MP3 licensing" if you really don't understand that the MP3 format isn't "free". Microsoft got whacked with a $1.5
billion judgement a while back - it was only reversed after Microsoft convinced a judge that they really did have a license to use MP3 in their product(s) - as mentioned above, Microsoft
does pay Thomson the licensing fees for MP3. If it was really "free", do you think Microsoft would be paying for it?
To avoid the MP3 patent/licensing risks, I use the "freely available" WAV recording supplied with every recent copy of Windows.
Now, "dead air and silence"....
Let's presume a certain TGRP first goes active at 01:30:00. It's active for 48 seconds. I've recorded 48 seconds of audio. Now let's say that TGRP doesn't go active again until 05:31:00, at which time it's active for 7 seconds. If I'm recording audio to a single file, I have two choices:
Option 1: Record the new 05:31 audio immediately after the 01:30 audio. The WAV file now contains 55 seconds of audio. It's nice and small but, on playback,
you have no idea when the 7 seconds of audio at 05:31:00 was actually received. For all you know, those 7 seconds could've been received any time between 01:30:48 and whenever you stopped the recording.
Option 2: Pad the file from 01:30:48 until 05:31:00 with "silence" (bytes that represent "no audio here"), and record the 7 seconds of audio at the "right place" (time-wise) in the file. Excellent - now, when you play the file back, you know that the 7 seconds of audio at the end started 4 hours, 12 seconds after the first 48-second sample ended. But, your file is now enormous. At ~1650 bytes per second, the file's size is about 24 megabytes, but only contains 55 seconds of audio.
In my opinion, neither of those options are "right". In the first case, we've lost all timing information - we can't go back in the morning and ask "when those sirens woke me up at 2 AM, where were they going?". In the second case, we can do that, but at the expense of recording a potential 142 megabytes per object per day.
There is another potential solution... using #1 above, a) keep track of how much audio I've actually recorded (so I think I know the time vs. byte offset in the WAV file), b) keep track of current time-of-day vs. the time-of-day when the file started, and c) write these differences to a separate text file. You, the user, would have to look at the text file when playing back your audio. In the example above, when you're playing back the WAV file and hear the apparent start of a conversation, you'd look at the audio player's "current time". You'd see something around 00:48. You'd then look in the text file and search for a record like "00:00:48 WAV file offset equals time-of-day 05:31:00". To me, this seems
far more cumbersome than just looking at the name of the file(s) you're playing back.
Additionally, as I and others have mentioned several times now, there are free apps available that will let you join your 600+ WAV files together into a single WAV file.
You mentioned "Scanner Recorder a freeware pgm"... In case you're referring to the Scanner Recorder program at
http://www.davee.com/scanrec/ , that program does not record to MP3. It records WAV files. From the FAQ on that page (and presuming it's correct):
Q: Can I record to .MP3 files?
A: No. Even though the compressors show MP3 in the list, you still are going to record to a wav files. It's possible there are .WAV to .MP3 converters available as shareware or freeware.
