OnlyR

All recent versions of Windows come with a built-in utility for recording sound, which is useful for quickly capturing audio. However, it does not allow you to customize any settings related to the output file.

OnlyR is a straightforward, open-source utility that it just as easy to use as the recording tool bundled with the OS, but it also allows you to customize some audio parameters before capturing sound.

Users who aren’t happy with the Voice Recorder application included in Windows 10 will surely appreciate this program’s simplistic user interface. It consists of a single small window with an accessible start/stop button.

Once a recording has started, you can keep track of the level of the sound coming through the selected input device, and the program also displays the length of the recording.

While OnlyR is a very simple application, it does offers some advanced customization options. Aside from selecting the preferred input device, you can also set the sample rate, channel mode and MP3 bit rate.

It is possible to limit the maximum length of the recording, add a fade out effect at the end and set the desired genre in the MP3 tag once the file is created.

On the whole, OnlyR doesn’t offer a particularly comprehensive set of features, it is still more powerful than the recording utility you get when installing Windows. Most importantly, it allows you to define various encoding parameters when saving files, which is not possible with the built-in recording utility.

The application is relatively easy to use and features a minimalistic GUI, but it is worth noting that it can only export recordings to MP3, which is bad news for users who would prefer to save them as WAV files.