The procedure is simple, but it does require mucking around with parts of Windows that most users never get into. To make Windows 95 switch from the sound recorder to the media player whenever it is told to play WAV files, you'll have to change the way WAV files are associated. MPLAYER doesn't need to load the entire WAV file into memory and doesn't try to. I've double clicked on WAVs that were more than 500 megabytes in size, and MPLAYER began to play the audio almost instantly. It doesn't matter how big the WAV file is. MPLAYER starts playing a WAV file immediately. That stands for "multimedia player." MPLAYER is actually a front end for all sorts of audio and video playback methods in Windows - even, odd as it sounds, for WAV files when they are played in the background (by your Web browser, for example). What's needed is a WAV player that doesn't need to load the entire WAV file into memory to play it.
And that's why the little sound recorder will chew away at a 20-megabyte WAV file for a long, long time to load it on a PC that has only 16 megabytes of memory. In Windows, as long as the PC has a large swap file that Windows can use for extra memory, programs are not told how much real memory is available, so they'll try to load any file they come to. It does this even with files that are larger than the PC's real memory, too. It's very slow at this because it was not designed to handle large files and can't deal with them well, but it dutifully swallows the file, byte by byte, until all of it is in memory. What happens is this: When you double click on a large WAV file, the sound recorder starts loading it. Modern PCs nearly always have many megabytes of memory, so you'd think the sound recorder's behavior would not cause a problem even with WAF files of 10 megabytes or more. After all, most of the brief Windows sounds are small WAVs ranging from a few hundred bytes to a few kilobytes. If you only play small WAVs, this limitation doesn't matter. I'm sure most users don't know this, and most experts on Windows probably don't know this, either. Many sound cards come with WAV recorders.)īy design, the Windows sound recorder does not play a WAV file until it loads the entire file into memory. You may have a "real" WAV recorder already. (You can use more serious recorders for unlimited-length recordings, of course. Clicking the record button on the Windows sound recorder if it did not have a one-minute limit and then asking all the kids to say "Hi" to grandma might take up 50 megabytes, and sitting yourself down and plucking that old guitar for a few choruses of Woody Guthrie songs might cost you 200 megabytes.Ĭlearly, Microsoft was doing you a favor when it limited the recording time in the sound recorder. The danger is real, because a WAV recording made at the highest quality level (which many users would be likely to choose) consumes about 10 megabytes of disk space a minute.
This is the result of a decision by Microsoft to keep its support calls down, I suppose, because hundreds of thousands of Windows users a year probably would be calling Microsoft with a peculiar problem if the sound recorder had no such limitation: They would have run out of disk space and would figure something was wrong with Windows.
The sound recorder has a serious limitation: It can record for only a minute. You can make your own WAVs using the sound recorder, capturing the audio from a microphone or from an external source such as your CD-ROM drive. WAV (pronounced "wave") files are digital audio files, in monaural or stereo, of varying quality based on how they are recorded or transcribed. There are other audio formats - MIDI is the most common of all the non-WAV audio formats, for example - but any time you hear a sound in a Windows sound scheme, your PC is playing a WAV file. Nearly all the sounds that you hear on your PC are WAV files. The problem is easy to fix, and I'll show you how.įirst, I'll explain what WAV files are for those of you who may not be sure. Microsoft built a much better WAV playback system into Windows 95, but why the company chose to make the sound recorder the default WAV playback device is beyond my understanding. One thing that irks me about the way Microsoft sets up Windows 95 is the thoughtless association of WAV files with the Windows sound recorder.
Windows tips: How come Microsoft didn't figure out how to get Windows to play WAV files right? Here's a quick fix that will turn Windows into a dutiful audio companion.Īl Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Get Windows to play WAV audio files the right way