SOLUTIONS
Column by Rory Newell, Sept. 13, 2007
For those of you who have the new Microsoft Operating System, Windows Vista, this may concern you.
Generally anyone who has used Windows has at some point in time messed around with Sound Recorder. This program allows the computee to record sound through a microphone or some sort of sound capturing device.
The program also allows the computee to play the sound back, make it slower, faster, louder, or softer, make it reversed, add an echo, mix with another audio file, or insert it into another audio file.
There could be others, but I don’t know what they are. Given that, it’s been used as a cheap and easy way to manipulate audio and have some fun. There are more expensive programs that can do more, but… they’re more expensive.
This is where Vista comes in and where the concern comes in, as well. They… botched Sound Recorder… really bad. The only thing it can do now is record audio and then save it to the hard drive and that’s literally it.
That means zero fun. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking when they gutted the program. Possibly they found the features frivolous? Maybe they were thought unnecessary? I can’t tell you.
This was my only problem with Vista, so it’s a bit big to me and because of that I’m very delighted in giving some good news. After doing a Wikipedia search, (I promise the info I got was 100 percent vandalism-free) I found a neat solution to this problem.
Instead of forsaking Vista and just sticking with XP, all you have to do is take the execute file (the .exe one), which is SndRec32.exe, and put it on your Vista computer anywhere, although the Desktop would be better for access, and it’ll be just like having XP’s Sound Recorder on your Vista computer, except the window will be all Vista-y.