Why is it that my sound recorder won’t let me record the full length of a song from a CD, as whenever I try it only lets me record 5 seconds of the song?

I assume you’re using the Windows “Sound Recorder” program on your computer. This works by converting an analogue signal into a digital one. Your CD holds, of course, a digital signal, but sound cards convert it to analogue and then, before recording, the analogue is converted back to digital.

CD quality digital recording involved 44,100 16 bit samples per second for each channel, so each second will require 176,400 bytes of storage. A typical four minute song would need a touch over 40 megabytes of your hard disk.

However “Sound Recorder” only records to your computer’s memory. When I set mine to 44.1kHz, 16 bits, stereo, it will only allow me to record 5.94 seconds. And I’ve got 64MB of RAM!

The solution is to use a better program. If you have a SoundBlaster audio card, you probably have a program called “Wave Studio”. This will record to hard disk and you can record as much as will fit on the hard disk. Alternatively, you can use “Cool Edit 96″, available from most shareware software sites. This one is *very* powerful. Registration is $US50, but even without registration, you can use all its features, but only two of them at any one time.

Thanks to Stephen Dawson, Canberra Times hi-fi columnist, for providing the reply to this question.