3.4 Sound Recorder

The sound recorder allows you to record your speaker's output, and thus sources like YouTube or similar.

3.4.1 Start and stop recording

Do one of the following to open up the recording panel:

  • Press Ctrl+R, or
  • Select Window ▶ Sound recorder from the menu.

The recording panel will be displayed:

Recorder panel Recorder panel
Start recording by clicking on
. The record button becomes red:
Recorder panel when recording Recorder panel when recording
The peak meter is filled with a colored bar to indicate the current loudness of the recording.
Click on
to finish recording. Soundpad will encode the recording and add it to your sound list.
Click on
to open the recorder preferences.
The volume slider directly affects the recording volume, so it's recommended to leave the volume unchanged while recording.

3.4.2 Recorder preferences

You can access the recorder preferences by
  • clicking the gear button in the sound recorder, or
  • selecting File ▶ Preferences ▶ Recorder from the menu.

Save as

You can choose M4A, MP3 or WAV.

  • WAV is an uncompressed audio format and takes a lot of space on the hard drive, but it doesn't require encoding or decoding. This makes the recording save process faster.
  • M4A (recommended) is a compressed audio format and enabled by default. It takes considerably less space on the hard drive, while maintaining a very good quality of the original sound, but it requires encoding and decoding. While decoding is unnoticeably fast, the encoding takes some time, in particular for long recordings. The recording save process takes longer than with WAV.
  • MP3 is a compressed audio format like M4A.
Independent of your system's rendering configuration, Soundpad will convert every recording to stereo with a sample rate of 48.000 Hz.

Insert position in sound list

Specify where your recordings shall be added in the sound list. You can choose between Beginning and End.

Automatically normalize recordings

This option is highly recommended, because the sound output on your speakers or headphones is amplified. The digital audio representation in the audio processing can be much lower than the perceived output. Recordings can be very quiet if this option is disabled.

The default value is 89 dB. This value equals -23 LU, which is the suggested standard by the EBU 128 audio normalization recommendation. Higher values than 99 dB are not recommended, because they're very close to the limit and will lead to clipping and noticeable distortion.

Trim silence

When enabled, beginning and ending silence is removed from new recordings.

Maximum recording time

This is a protection setting to avoid recording indefinitely. You can remove it by setting it to 0. The default value is 300 (5 minutes).

Long recordings are buffered on the hard drive in the %TEMP%-directory. The buffered data is uncompressed and requires a lot of disk space. If the maximum recording time is disabled, and you don't finish a recording yourself, then Soundpad will continue to record until the disk runs out of space.

3.4.3 Recorder hotkeys

You can define special hotkeys to start and stop recording. This is helpful if you want to record a sound while running exclusive fullscreen games or applications.

Learn more: Special Hotkeys

You get an audio notification when using these hotkeys. The recording will begin immediately after the notification sound was fully played, so it isn't recorded as well.

The notification sound can be changed or disabled at File ▶ Preferences ▶ Notifications ▶ Recorder.