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REVIEW: a brand new phone / meeting call recorder with great, unique rolling recording capabilities: LivePVR by Softtrends LLC

This sound / voice recorder application is both a phone call autorecorder and a meeting recorder with a, on the Pocket PC, really unique (yes, I know what I’m speaking about – I’ve thoroughly tested all the alternate voice/sound recorder applications – please see the “Recommended links” section for links) feature: “rolling recording”.

In this article, I thoroughly compare the just-released, latest (2.4) version to the already existing alternates, particularly PMRecorder (please read the review of the latter here – I will NOT explain why you can’t record the other party on most Pocket PC Phone Edition in this article!)

Compatibility, availability

It’s available here and costs $9.95. The trial version is pretty usable and only time (30 days) constrained if you want to take it for a test ride.

It’s only compatible with WM5. I’ve tested it on two WM5 PPC Phone Edition devices (HTC Universal and HTC Wizard) – both worked OK (except for the VGA incompatibility problems on the former).

The unique feature: “rolling recording”

It may happen to you many times that you would like to record things that have just been said. In these cases, “rolling recording” can be of help. It makes it possible to record things that have already been said – before you pressed the “Record” button.

Please note that you will need to read the online documentation on the “rolling recording” in order to be able to properly utilize the unique rolling recording facility of the app. (Note that the homepage has a dead link to the Virtual Demo). In my extensive tests, rolling recording worked flawlessly and really delivered what it's supposed to.

Compared to...

Yes, as applications (fortunately) don't exist in isolation, it's the best to compare this app to the numerous alternates to get a clerar picture whether it's worth getting (or even trying).

As opposed to other “standard” voice recorders...

Pros

Buffering functionality – no other voice recorder is capable of the same. Note that the “Rewind Length” slider in Vianix Pocket Talk Enterprise Pro only sets the amount of seconds the Rewind icon steps back on each press (the same stands for forwarding).

It puts the entire date/time (incl. seconds) in the filename. Except for iPlay (which puts hours and minutes in the filenames – not the seconds) and Personal Memory Systems’ Audio Memory System (which is quite revolutionary in that it puts both the date, the time (incl. seconds) and a user-supplied remark in the filename), no other recorder does the same: they “only” autonumber the files. This approach can be easier for many people, particularly if you see the filelist from an application (for example, the FileList control itself in Windows Mobile itself when listing files created more than a day ago) without timestamps or, when the timestamps are lost (because, for example, you FTP the files or ActiveSync synchronizes them to the desktop).

Isn’t overpriced, unlike many of the alternates

No excess CPU usage: in both “conference” mode and while actively recording, around 1% only (measured on the HTC Wizard, recording to a storage card), which certainly shows it’s well-written and bugfree (in this respect)

Can record as a background task (unlike Notes)

Moderate memory usage: with 45 sec pre/postbuffers (as can also be seen in this Settings screenshot), it’s 2 Mbytes only

Cons

On the Pocket PC, no touchscreen support: must be operated by the D-pad + Action button + WM5 softkeys or the built-in keyboard (if present)

Sometimes, on the HTC Wizard, D-Pad only started to work after a forced screen orientation change while the app is active (this isn’t a problem on the HTC Universal though). This was also the case when traversing the focus to another application and then, switching back to LivePVR: you must change the screen orientation in order to be regain control on the GUI. After resetting the Pocket PC, these problems generally went away. It’s still be good to be aware of the solution if you want to avoid resetting your PPC.

Recording quality can in no way be set - everything is recorded as lengthy (about one Megabyte for every 45 seconds) PCM files, no matter what the system-level quality setting is. (Needless to say, it sports no codecs either, unlike many of the alternates.)

There are no niceties like Voice Activation System (VAS)

No VGA support – it only occupies the upper left quarter of the screen on VGA devices like the HTC Universal even in standard (SE) VGA mode

WM5 only (tested on other, previous platforms – a no-go)

As far as phone recording is concerned, as opposed to PMRecorder:

Pros

Resulting file doesn’t have an additional header and, therefore, need to be converted in order to be played in any media players. (Note that PMRecorder, thanks to my documenting the header and a Russian coder coding the converter, already has a third-party decoder.)

Cons

Doesn’t store the number of the caller/called

Auto-phonecall-recording must be reactivated by hand after every single reboot

PMRecorder has two recording quality settings (one of them using the space-saving GSM vocoder); this only one

Costs $10 (as opposed to the free PMRecorder)

Verdict

For a phone call recorder, stick with PMRecorder. The latter is definitely better in every respect. The same stands for recording individual voice notes where rollbacking isn’t needed (because you know beforehand what you want to record and what not).

However, as far as conference/meeting recording is concerned where rollback capabilities are a must, you won’t find anything better for the Pocket PC. It’s only in this case that I heartily recommend this application.

A TIP: how can you make it record all your phone calls without explicitly starting LivePVR?

It must be done exactly the same way as with PMRecorder: you just put a link to the executable of the program, \Program Files\LivePVR\sftLivePVR.exe, into \Windows\StartUp (with PMRecorder, the executable can be found by default at \Program Files\PMRecorder\PMRecorder.exe).

Unfortunately, while with PMRecorder it’s sufficient to just minimize the task when it’s (auto)started (and it will record everything), with LivePVR, you MUST explicitly go to the Phone Call PVR menu (one Action button press) and explicitly reactivate phone recording (two Action button presses). After this, you can safely minimize it, just as with PMRecorder, and it will record all your calls.

Note that while, seemingly, auto recording is activated upon reboot, in practice, it doesn’t work. This is why you will need to reactivate it after every reboot. In this respect, PMRecorder is certainly easier to operate, particularly if you often reboot your device.

Recommended links

In addition to the most important PMRecorder article, I also recommend the following articles:

Everything you may need to know about sound recording on the Pocket PC

and, to a lesser degree, my following reviews:

Personal Memory Systems’ Audio Memory System

MotionApps’ mVoice 5