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:
Start recording by clicking on .
The record button becomes red:
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.
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