is there any windows software that will record audio and save it as a file (likely .mp3) every hour - much like CCTV but for audio
it told me:
Audacity with Timer Record and Auto Save Plugins
Features: Audacity, a free and open-source audio editor, has a “Timer Record” feature that can be set to stop and start automatically at specific intervals. With additional plugins or scripting, it’s possible to save recordings every hour automatically.
Options
After Recording completes:
Repeat the task or so
that would be the solution
I could not find the “auto save plugin”
maybe audacity could be scripted using a command line to do this - but I already did this using “ffmpeg” and it stops sometimes after a few days - I am not sure why (I’ll post the code for “ffmpeg” bat file in the next post)
@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
:loop
rem Get current date and time in a format suitable for filenames
for /f "tokens=1-4 delims=/: " %%a in ("%TIME%") do (
set hour=%%a
set minute=%%b
set second=%%c
set ms=%%d
)
for /f "tokens=2-4 delims=/ " %%a in ("%DATE%") do (
set year=%%c
set month=%%a
set day=%%b
)
rem Zero-padding for hours if necessary
if %hour% lss 10 set hour=0%hour%
rem Construct the filename with date and time
set filename=D:\audio\output_%year%-%month%-%day%_%hour%-%minute%-%second%.mp3
rem Record for 3600 seconds (1 hour)
"C:\Users\USER\z\ffmpeg-master-latest-win64-gpl-shared\bin\ffmpeg.exe" -f dshow -i audio="@device_cm_{33D9A762-90C8-11D0-BD43-00A0C911CE86}\wave_{C14EA6CB-8858-4716-98DA-BBD8FF2E2ADC}" -t 3600 -b:a 96k "!filename!"
rem Loop again
goto loop
BUT I have seen the ffmpeg just oddly stop in the middle of it all after a few days - some anomaly - I have not understood what might have caused it - since PC was not going to sleep or anything
Audacity supports scripting in any language that supports “named pipes”.
The supported commands (listed here: Scripting Reference - Audacity Manual) can be sent via named pipes. This requires the “mod-script-pipe” module to be enabled. There is some information here: Scripting - Audacity Manual
If you know any Python, you may be interested in a script that I wrote a couple of years ago, for making a sequence of recordings, using mod-script-pipe and the “pipeclient.py” module: audacity/scripts/piped-work/pipeclient.py at release-3.7.1 · audacity/audacity · GitHub. If I recall correctly, I uploaded my script to GitHub…
(just looking for it)…
This may be an Audacity housekeeping process. Every time Audacity performs a major edit or other operation, it saves a copy of The Whole Show as a backup or “Edit > Undo.” So it’s possible your one hour save is really two and the next one is really four, etc.
Here’s how this works. If you stop the recording about four hours into the process, I bet you expect Audacity to be able to Edit > Undo all the way back to the first hour. This is how it does it.
Don’t fall in love with Audacity saving work to external drives. Audacity likes to do everything on the local drive—Full Stop.
There’s another oddity. Audacity doesn’t form Time-Of-Day information along with the sound in the file.
These shortcomings, and others, are some of the reasons Audacity can’t be used for Surveillance, Law Enforcement, or Conflict Resolution.
thank you