SoundCopy

Music can nowadays be made on the computer, either entirely, or still using recording devices to include external sound. Windows comes with a default recording utility, but it might not satisfy more complex demands. Luckily, you can use various alternatives like SoundCopy which are also fitted with conversion options.

Once installed, you’re free to launch the application to see how you can benefit from it’s recording features. The main window is pretty compact, but wrapped around a custom-made interface that can blend in any environment. Buttons and functions mostly speak for themselves, with additional description balloons that show up when hovering the cursor over them.

The core function is sound recording, but if you’re expecting to use a connected microphone, you might as well rely on the default Windows tool. This is because the source device is speaker sound, and unfortunately, it can’t be switched to a dedicated recording device. What’s more, the output is always WAV.

For a bit more flexibility, you might want to know there’s a built-in scheduler. It can be used to make SoundCopy automatically start grabbing sound at a specific hour, minute, and second. Making it stop is done by writing down values that determine the length of the process. A corresponding option lets you specify save path, to save more time.

If you don’t want to use the scheduler, then you need to rely on the main window buttons, because there’s no support for hotkeys. This would have come in handy for instantly initiating a recording process from the moment you hear something of interest. As mentioned above, you can load existing WAV files to convert them to MP3.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that SoundCopy is a practical little recorder if you need to capture speaker sound under the WAV format. There aren’t any sophisticated menus or options, and the scheduler only takes a little while to configure. Although you can only record to WAV, there’s a built-in converter with MP3 output.