Scanner Recorder Scanrec description
Scanner Recorder (Scanrec) - Free audio recorder that is primarily designed to record speech

Scanner Recorder (Scanrec) is a free audio recorder that is primarily created to record speech.

It has a VOX control that allows the user to save disk space when no sound is present in the signal.

Since FM communications has such an effective squelch, the recorder works best with FM. HF ham bands and World Band radio have such a poor signal to noise ratio that the VOX gate on Scanrec might not be very easy to set.

Some of the uses of Scanner Recorder are:
- Recording radio communications.
- Recording channels that hardly ever have activity. Catch rarely heard conversations.
- Air traffic control recording.
- Dictation.
- Record (compressed) broadcast radio or TV and listen to it when it's more convenient.

Scanner Recorder provides a switched recorder that listens to the sound coming into the audio card and if the sound is above the minimum threshold, the recorder operates. If the sound level falls below the threshold, the recorder pauses.

Since the recorder starts and stops based on what it hears, Scanner Recorder incorporates an anti-clipping feature that keeps the very beginning of the audio that breaks the squelch threshold from being clipped off. The result is that when sound is played back, there is no noticeable "click". Also the beginning of the audio event is not clipped off (like mechanical vox recorders do).

The output file format only supports WAV files. Currently you will need a separate WAV player capable of playing very large files. The Media Player that comes with Windows 95 (and NT) works fine to play back the files. It is capable of playing back very large files.