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Old August 5th 05, 07:05 AM
 
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I've been using your program for some time. Here are my suggestions:

1) Multichannel with individual squelch would sure work for me, and
quite frankly it would be the only way to get me to pay for the
software. I'm sure there is a pro-audio multitrack file format.

2) Some sort of periodic auto-save function is needed. I often record
in the field and don't always catch the notebook battery meter
indicating a low function.

Note that I always record in PCM and then convert to compressed audio
later. This has a few advantages. One, I can "normalize" the audio in
soundforge prior to compressing it. If you adjust the audio level of a
compressed file, I believe it gets compressed twice. Second, I I can
take individual bits of audio and boost the level of just that section.
Audio levels are all over the map if you record military air. Third,
the filters work better on PCM. Often I need to notch 400hz and 1200Hz
from aircraft generators.

Now this leads to another featu

3) Dump the auto-clip scheme. Sixteen bits of audio is plenty of
headroom. Encourage the user to leave a bit of headroom when recording.
Then for each segment of audio, normalize it. This will adjust for
variations in audio level from radio to radio. This implies you will
need a buffer for the audio segment, and the ability to simultaneously
normalize one segment of audio while still recording the next segment.

Here is an idea for another product. These flash recorders (Iriver,
Creative, etc) are getting quite cheap, but they still haven't mastered
the idea of a vox. A program that would take a file from a flash
recorder and strip out the silence would be useful.

Ultimately, the audio recorder belong in the scanner itself. The
manufacturers are idiots for not doing so. It would have the advantage
that the audio segment could be tagged with frequency, time, talk
group,etc.You could scan multiple frequencies and then reassemble all
the audio segments using the tags. Uniden and GRE just can't think out
of the box. For P25, you could just store the digital audio.