Remember when voice recording was hard? Rare? A special event? Cost money? Required special hardware?

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Recording on YouTube.

(hat tip BoingBoing)

Related Posts:

• Recording in the News
• Anniversary of BetaMax Decision

Although developed for Windows, Recall-PRO can be executed on the Linux operating system using the free Wine software compatibility layer. RecAll-PRO + Wine should also work on other flavors of Linux, but for the purposes of this article we focus on Ubuntu because of its current popularity and for the simple reason that some of our development machines uses this flavor. The procedure described has been tried on Natty Narwhal (version 11.04), Maverick Meerkat (10.10), and Oneiric Ocelot (11.10).

First, Wine must be installed. (We tend to use Synaptic Package Manager, but old-time Unix hands will open a Terminal Window and type “sudo apt-get” commands.) Start Synaptic Package Manager and enter “wine” in the search text field.

Select “wine1.3” (or later) and click the Apply button.

Download the latest RecAll-PRO install executable using your favorite web browser. In Linux, EXE file downloads do not have executable priveleges, so we have to change that now. Go to the Downloads section of your browser and <right-click> -> Open containing folder. (Note: Changing file executable permissions may not be necessary on recent versions of Ubuntu+Wine.)

Click the “Allow executing file as program” control.

In the folder, do not try to launch the RecAll-PRO EXE directly, but <right-click> -> Open with Wine Windows Program Loader.

This will start the installer to load RecAll-PRO and its help file on your computer.

Most features work as expected. MP3 recording does not work at present– perhaps later we will figure out how to access an Mpeg ACM codec under Wine. Vorbis and Speex compression work fine, because they do not rely on external codecs.

To start RecAll-PRO after installation:

Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) and the Unity desktop (and presumably all later versions): Use the Dash home button and start RecAll-PRO as with any native application. Coolness!

Natty Narwhal 11.04 and the Unity desktop: The first Unity iteration did not seem to have the best support for Wine applications. Add back the classic menu using the procedure here, and start using Classic menu-> Wine-> Programs-> Sagebrush-> RecAll-PRO.

Maverick Meerkat (10.10) (and possibly earlier versions) : Click applications menu-> Wine-> Programs-> Sagebrush-> RecAll-PRO.

Note: Earlier versions of RecAll-PRO had a problem displaying properly with Linux+Wine, as shown below. More recent versions (v1.9 and later) do not have the problem.

Fin.

The MRU (Most Recently Used) section of a Files menu shows files that were recently opened by an application. The default Windows way of displaying file names is to omit file extensions. This can become confusing when the application can handle several different file extensions. As an example, how do you distinguish between MP3 and WAV files in RecAll-PRO?

Even as the program creator, I wasn’t sure how to change this behavior without digging deep into the source code. Like most coders, I use a framework, a wrapper around the Windows API (Applications Programming Interface) to ease programming tasks. Delving in the framework source code, we discover the MRU menu item uses the Windows API GetFileTitle function.

GetFileTitle returns the string that the system would use to display the filename to the user. The display name includes an extension only if that is the user’s preference for displaying file names. This means that the returned string may not accurately identify the file if it is used in calls to file system functions.

Getting closer. How do we turn on display of file extensions? The answer is not exactly obvious. In Windows Explorer, click on menu Tools -> Folder Options -> View, and look under Advanced settings for “Hide extensions for known file types“. Un-select this item. MRUs for our application will now show extensions. (check for xp)

Here is how our MRU menu looks with file extensions displayed:

I notice that some other applications always display MRU file extensions, no matter the user preference setting. Should we change this behavior for our programs?

RecAll-PRO version 1.0 was released ten years ago today.

A spin-off from standard RecAll with many advanced features, PRO became our best-selling public software product within a few months, and has remained so to this day.

Related Posts: Happy Birthday First Product

News item from last month:

A teen suspect’s snap decision to secretly record his interrogation with an MP3 player has resulted in a perjury case against a veteran detective and a plea deal for the teen. …

[via Schneier] The discussion on Schneier’s blog for this item (and most others) is worth reading.

On January 19, 2038, RecAll-PRO (and RecAll and to a lesser extent VCRadio) will display a bug. (Of course, we will issue a software update well before then to correct the problem.) A number of other programs from other companies will also develop problems. It won’t make big news like Y2K, but it is a detail needing correction in multiple software packages. Why 2038? How did we come to this? Why didn’t we fix this when fixing Y2K?

The discussion gets a bit technical, so if you aren’t familiar with binary arithmetic, feel free to skip ahead.

The Problem

The C run-time library, widely used by C and C++ programmers, provides a function for reading the current time:

time_t time(time_t *timer);

which returns the time as elapsed seconds since midnight January 1, 1970, the year that Unix first ran on a PDP-11/20 machine. In the parlance of programmers, time_t is a type definition, with data size not defined by the Posix standard but typically implemented as a 32 bit signed integer. The maximum date that coud be specified with this representation is Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Increment past that date and the variable will “overflow” to a negative number, representing the year 1901.

Using a time/date system representing seconds from a known obscure date might seem eccentric to non-programmers, but coders do this sort of thing all the time. The Windows operating system defines a FILETIME variable as a signed 64-bit value representing the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601. (Why 1601?) Java Date uses a signed 64-bit integer counting milliseconds from January 1, 1970. .NET DateTime uses an unsigned 62 bit (yes, 62) integer counting 100 nanosecond ticks from January 1, year 0001.

RecAll-PRO (and RecAll and VCRadio) use Unix time to store timecodes for audio files, to represent the date and time when sound was recorded. A number of other programs will also affected by the problem, variously known as Y2038 or Y2.038K.

Testing

Setting the computer clock forward to February 2038, we verify that RecAll-PRO has problems displaying the proper time. The date display fails, so RecAll-PRO “gracefully” degrades to displaying relative time position.

We wanted to know if our current C compiler could use time_t variables larger than 32 bits, or could work with a 32 bit unsigned number, so we could extend beyond year 2038, so we wrote a quick test program. The answer is NO.

Out of curiosity, we wrote a quick program to display the maximum FILETIME possible. Unfortunately, the FileTimeToSystemTime function only works for half the maximum range of FILETIME, so we use that instead:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <windows.h> int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
FILETIME ft;
// MSDN: “The FileTimeToSystemTime function only works with FILETIME values
// that are less than 0×8000000000000000.”
ft.dwHighDateTime = 0x7ffffffful;
ft.dwLowDateTime = 0xfffffffful;

SYSTEMTIME st;
if (FileTimeToSystemTime(&ft,&st))
printf(“Maximum filetime date: month=%d day=%d, year=%d\n”, st.wMonth,st.wDay, st.wYear);

return 0;
}

Maximum filetime date: month=9 day=14, year=30828
Press any key to continue

Year 30828 should be large enough for our purposes. If you need larger dates, please let us know.

The Fix

We use a Microsoft C++ compiler for development work, but not their most recent product. Microsoft documentation notes that Visual C++ 2005 is the first Microsoft compiler to use signed 64 bit integers for the time() function, which should fix the problem.

If we decide not to update compilers, we could write our own version of time() that accepts 64 bit integers, perhaps using FILETIME internally.

News.com reports Ohio electronic voting machines have privacy issues involving time stamps.

“Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election’s results–including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.” — Declan McCullagh, News.com

Our recording products have timecodes embedded in the audio files. Of course, our software is not involved in elections, but Sagebrush customers have imaginative applications, from security monitoring to documenting barking dogs to demonstrating a sleeping-partner snores. Given the news item shown here, can anyone think of a way that audio timecodes could cause an unplanned privacy problem?

Related post: When Time Stamps Go Bad

IEEE Spectrum has a first-class technical summary of the Vodafone Greece cellphone wiretapping scandal. This story has it all: apparent suicide, wiretapping of conversations with key high level politicians and officials, rogue software, destroyed logs, subversion of wiretapping capability originally implemented for law enforcement requirements.

(huzzah! Schneier)

Previously: Recording in the News

How could one record left and right audio channels to separate files?

RecAll-PRO version 1.5 or later has an undocumented (until now) command-line option to record only from left or right channel of an audio signal.

<path>/RecallPro.exe -C Left

<path>/RecAllPro.exe -C Right

The program should be configured to record Mono audio for this option. (Command-line parameters are not case sensitive here.)

Windows XP and Vista allow more than one program to record from the same audio input device. If we start two instances of RecAll-PRO, one recording from the left channel and the second recording from left channel, we should be able to record from two mono audio sources into two separate audio files, using one sound input device. This could be useful for applications that monitor several inputs, such as recording multiple telephone lines or multiple radio stations.

In practice, we need an input audio device with little or no crosstalk between left and right channels. We tested a sound card some years ago with significant channel-to-channel crosstalk, but recent tests with modern sound cards show no audible crosstalk. To test, we need to build a simple two-mono to one-stereo adapter:

Male 3.5mm (1/8″) audio plugs are RadioShack 274-284, and the female jack is RS 274-274. Label one male plug “L”, and the other “R”. Connect grounds of all three connectors together, and left of female to left (or right) of “L”, and right channel of female to right (or left) of “R”. (We assume balanced audio sources for the present.)

(Read rest of article.)

Recording traffic stop results in felony charge. Link [via]

Passenger tapes interview with pilot and questions flight delay. Link [via]

Bike theft recording transformed into music video. Link [via]

Privatized downtown may prohibit photos/recording. Link [via]

Parents’ voice-activated recorder not admissible as evidence against bus driver. Link