Low price audio recording software for Windows

Question

I need to capture an about 8 hour long, continuous audiostream. What software does this best?

The audiostream is made available by the microphone input of the computer. It gets the audio directly from the mixer. It's an analog stereo signal.

My needs:

should be able to work continuously for at least 8h without hiccups
if there are hiccups, the audio shall not be lost, e.g. by regularly saving parts on the harddisk
should run on a low-to-mid-end computer
shall not require an SSD

Would be nice:

if it saves to some lossless compression format so I save at least a bit of disk space

the computer that i'll be using is an unknown variable, it's most likely going to be one of my friends' laptop.

8 hours on 128 channels with 96 bit and 192 kHz is 281 MB/s and a total of 7.9 TB. That probably won't work on a low end computer without SSD. We should really have some more specs. — Thomas Weller, Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 21:14
@Thomas Weller: it's only stereo, so only two channels (right?) — rolfrudolfwolf, Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 21:38

martinstoeckli · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-27 20:00:04Z

6

A tool with a very good reputation is Audacity, it's an open source project.

You can choose the input source for recording.
The stream will be stored uncompressed in several small files. This will use much disk space, but is an advantage if you want to edit the sound, e.g. to filter noise.
After the work is done, you can export the whole project as MP3 or in many other formats, and delete the uncompressed files.

answered Jun 27, 2016 at 20:00

martinstoeckli

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OP asked for lossless compression. Is it built-in?
– Thomas Weller
Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 21:14
@ThomasWeller - I'm not familiar with all the supported formats, but at least FLAC is offered for exports.
– martinstoeckli
Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 21:54
thanks, i tried it out, and it seems to work very well. a one minute reciording session of a stereo input caused about 20Mb of disk space usage, so if I record for 8 hours, that should amount to about 9.6Gb, which is alright. it also saves the recording in 1Mb chunks and can recover them if the program is force-closed via the task manager. i think this will do.
– rolfrudolfwolf
Commented Jun 29, 2016 at 12:08
I finally used it, and it worked terrific. was able to record about 12 hours, without any hickups. audacity lets me export to wav and mp3, which is nice.
– rolfrudolfwolf
Commented Jul 19, 2016 at 14:59

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