Sound Recording Solutions
Sound Card Recorder
Powerful voice activated microphone recorder for Windows. Click here to learn more.Multimedia Container Format
MCF is an open (the specifications are available for everybody, free of charge), free (no royalties) data storage format called Multimedia Container Format (or Movie Container Format). The group has promised that the format and all software developed by them for will also stay free; it won't be turned into a commercial project once it's popular. Essentially it is a file format, like Microsoft's AVI. However, it is also much more than that, having streaming and broadcasting features in the same format. It is not video or audio compression algorithm, but instead just a container that can hold any media inside it. This includes MPEG-4 (XviD and DivX), AC3, Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and others. Strict standard: doesn't allow users to add extensions by their own, like AVI, OGM and Matroska do. There is no technical reason to limit this, but this increases overall compatibility a lot and this is very important because the project is really aiming for hardware support. It's much better to have a single format that has the important features of all others. To make writing software easy, MCF uses fixed binary structures or otherwise simple methods whenever possible. One thing not found in MCF is XML (however, there might still be some stored inside MCF). Also, because of MCF's strictly defined binary structure and offsets of few headers, you can read them with single read command; this is very fast and really counts when you want to make inventory of all the files on your hard disk, on a network drive, or even of those on some FTP site (just read the first 2.5 KB of each file and you have all the data you need: no seeking and only a very little transfer). Menus, chapters, subtitles and everything in the same file/stream. ASCII-looking binary: MCF uses a lot of human-readable ASCII as identifiers instead of some random binary. This allows easy debugging files with any hex editor. Also, the very beginning of MCF files contains some information you can read with nearly any text editor. Variable framerates: allows using slightly higher framerates in high motion scenes and lower framerate when the motion is slower, reducing the amount of bandwidth required and improving quality. Seamless multi-segment: dividing a long movie to several files, that can be burnt on several discs. Okay, so what's new, I hear you asking. It's that if you have all segments available at the same time, you won't even notice the crossing of boundaries (most of the dirty work is done transparently in the parser, so players or codecs don't really need to bother with it). Or of course you can just join the segments into a single big file, or split into segments of different sizes. Also, every segment is playable alone too, and you can define any overlap time you wish on them. Full CRC32 protection: data can be protected, and if an error occurs (broken resume on download being the most common reason), the broken part is skipped (no more frozen frames or unplayable files). The parser can also tell where exactly the error happened, so you can re-download this specific part of the file. Another related feature is the playback of incomplete downloads without slow index regeneration or a requirement for a smart player with a smart parser. Digital signatures: allow protecting your releases against changes. If anyone changes the content on route, the digital signature can tell which parts have been changed, removed or added after signing it. One movie can also be signed by several different people, signing different parts of it, with different keys. This system uses commonly known public key algorithms, so it should be virtually unbreakable. Now you're going to ask how this is different from just signing your AVI files: In MCF only the content is signed, not the construct it is inside! So, one can remux it (to better suit streaming, maybe), divide it into segments in a different way (or combine all segments), or basically do anything that doesn't change the actual contents and the signature will stay valid. Or he can add or remove tracks (some languages he doesn't need, for instance), and the digital signature still validifies the parts that haven't been removed (but also tells which are missing or added). No digital rights management (DRM) or copy protection bits. There is no and there never will be support for these features trying to limit what users can do with the files they have. If you want to protect your content from being freely distributed, don't give copies of it for people you can't trust in the first place! The technical reasons for this are obvious too - if you can view something and you have specifications to the copy limiting system or sources for the player, you can break any protection in no time. The only systems that could work even for a moment (and probably not much longer) would be closed-source or hardware protection. Both of those also limit who can watch it (i.e. do I need a Fritz chip on my computer, with a complete Fritz-protected hardware/OS/software chain, or maybe Microsoft Windows with some commercial player). And in the end, someone will still break it, like happened with DVD's CSS. Not to mention that one could just take analog copy no matter how strong the digital protection used is.
Phone Call Recorder
Must have software for voice modem. Record all phone calls automatically, watch Caller ID information, create you own powerful answering machine. Perfect sound quality. Click here to learn more.3d audio effect - 3gp - a-law - aac - acm - adc - aiff - aliasing - amplifier - amr-wb - amr-wb plus - amr - apev2 tag - asf - atrac - audio codec - audio compression - avi - bitrate - bitrate peeling - chord - codec - comfort noise - compact audio cassette - compact disc - compression - compression artifact - compression ratio - contact microphone - container format - dab - data compression - digital audio - digital camera - divx - dolby digital - dolby digital plus - dsp - dvd-audio - dvd - effects unit - equalization - ffmpeg - flanging - fourcc - frequency spectrum - hi-fi - high-end audio - hiln - id3 - joint stereo - laser microphone - line level - lossy - loudspeaker - matroska - mcf - microphone - midi - mixing console - mp2 - mp3 - mp3 surround - mp3 sx - mp3pro - mp4 - mpeg-1 - mpeg-21 - mpeg-3 - mpeg-4 - mpeg-7 - mpeg - mu-law - musepack - music - mxf - nut - osm - parabolic microphone - pcm - perception - phonograph - pink noise - pqf - psychoacoustics - qdesign - quadraphonic - radio receiver - ratdvd - realaudio - red noise - reverberation - rhythm - ribbon microphone - riff - rmvb - sbr - signal processing - sound - sound card - sound effects - sound recording - spdif - speech encoding - speech recognition - speex - stereo - subwoofer - surround sound - synthesizer - tape recorder - tdm - tweeter - video - video compression - vob - voice analysis - vorbis - wav - white noise - wma - woofer