As a student of bioacoustics, and working with many devices, I often felt the absence of a quick recording method to access the sound cards and record at high sampling rates. Most of my experimental programs are elaborate and designed for specific tasks.

However, obtaining data should not be that difficult.

Hence, this Basic Matlab Sound Recorder does what one might need in a hurry: record, mark events of interest, and save data.

Command line output from example recording

Download from GitHub Repo

Unzip the folder and add it to your MATLAB search path. Follow the documentation and the example code for functional features.

Whether you want to record bird calls, take voice memos, or record notes, this handy tool will get you going with a single custom command or a script drafted out of your imagination.

Basic-Matlab-Sound-Recorder

A simple tool for quickly recording sounds using MATLAB® command window.

Check /examples for a working demo

  1. Call displayAudioDeviceInfo function to list the available inputs and outputs.

  2. Call SoundRecorderController without arguments for recording from default input at 44.1 kHz.

  3. You may use SoundRecorderController(deviceID, channelNumbers, numChannels, fs) where the deviceID is known from 1
  4. Use help SoundRecorderController to see the details of the remaining parameters
  5. Mark regions of interest by pressing t to obtain timestamps of the event. This comes in handy for post-processing
  6. Extended use: Incorporate into script designs for writing out .wav and clipping from timestamp etc.

Have fun!

Cite As: Umadi, Ravi (2023). A Simple Sound Recorder, Retrieved from https://biosonix.io/A-Simple-Sound-Recorder