MP3 Patent Countdown

Various Sagebrush programs are able to record and play MP3, but only if you already have an ACM MP3 audio codec installed on your computer, which was common during Windows XP but lessĀ  likely in later versions of Windows. We do not bundle an MP3 encoder with our products because the technology is covered by … Read more

Voice-O-Graph

Remember when voice recording was hard? Rare? A special event? Cost money? Required special hardware? Full size ad at Vintage Ads. More ads and hardware photos at Pinrepair. Recording on YouTube. (hat tip BoingBoing) Related Posts: Recording in the News Anniversary of BetaMax Decision

File Extensions in MRU

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 … Read more

Pro Birthday

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

Recording the Recorders

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.

Y2.038K Alert

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 … Read more

When Time Stamps Go Bad 2

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 … Read more

Recording in the News 2

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