The Sound Recorder App was one of the updated apps for Windows 10 January Technical Preview. The Sound Recorder App in Windows 8 was excellent, but it has a nasty design fault; you can’t get to the recordings unless you’re a geek that knows how to hack your device. The files then were always saved in the hidden AppData folder of user’s Profile. Since this folder and its subfolders are invisible to normal users, they don’t care about it’s content. Therefore it doesn’t get backed up except you’re using a backup program. For example users are used to dumping their MyDocument folder on a thumbdrive etc, but not the AppData folder. Therefore, when the system needs to be refreshed/re-installed, the data in AppData don’t normally survive the system reload. All your recordings gone thus. Now, this has been addressed in Build 9926 as you can see above. Sound Recorder now saves by default to your My Document folder under “Sound Recordings” sub-folder. This is joy as your recordings are now conspicuous and gets backed up or made redundant. That OneDrive you see in the screenshot is just me making MyDocument folder point to OneDrive.

Unfortunately, Sound Recorder only saves to My Document, I would rather that MS made this optional, so you can choose yourself where to save your soundbytes. For me, I would have loved to include it as a sub-folder of my Music folder on OneDrive so it is accessible from my Xbox Music player etc. But good, half-bread is better than none. So now you know, you’re in control of your sound recordings.

And there’s more! The new Sound Recording App now allows you to define Flags in your soundbytes. Flags are position markers that let you quick jump to positions of choice. Good for in meetings etc when you quickly want to play something for an audience.
You can also easily share now to other Applications by the conspicuous Share button. Only note that there are few Apps like the Mail App that accepts your soundbytes as Share-target. One would have expected Apps like the Xbox Music app or other media players accept soundbytes for playback etc.

So there you go. That is the new Sound Recorder for you in Build 9926. MS again listens to our complaints and made our soundbytes now accessible. Thanks Microsoft.