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The use of
Sound Recorder hold mouse over image to get image caption. 
Sound Recorder has been a standard Windows item since Windows 3.1 and found on
most all the versions of Windows. It is not fancy but it does a few things
reasonably well. The function is much like that of a simple cassette recorder
as far as recorder, playback, pause, fast forward and rewind. It should
record from a mic attached to your sound card microphone input also.
To Start sound recorder you should be able to go to the start button, then programs, then accessories, then entertainment on most Windows 9x/ME systems. It may be slightly different on Windows 3.1 and early Windows 95 versions, or customized Windows versions. I am not sure it is on Windows NT or not, but it should function on Windows 2000 Professional the same as the Windows 98 version. The next thing you will see is the actual control face of the Sound Recorder program once you open it. While it is not an impressive program to look at it functions in a fairly straight forward manner much like a cassette recorder would. 
You should notice that the controls only function when a file is loaded or
the recording process starts. To open an existing WAV file go to File, then
Open, then browse to the file on your system you wish to open. Keep in mind
Sound Recorder only is intended for use with WAV formats. To change the size
or format of an existing file to use a smaller format you would first open the
file as mentioned above then, goto File, then select the Properties option.
This will open the Properties for Sound screen as shown here. Then click the
convert button and it will open the Sound Formats screen.
The codec used for the sound compression by Sound Recorder is found here. It
should list the codecs available on your computer. Keep in mind the format
selected will have a great effect on the size the WAV file is when you are
done, as well as the audio properties of the file.
Hint:
it is a very good idea to use the SAVE AS option when saving the file
generated in the conversion. This will keep the file you started with intact
until you have a chance to review the size and audio of the file.
The higher the quality of the audio properties the larger the file size and the faster the bit rate on your system. As a rule of thumb here are some Bit Rates commonly used so you can decide on the amount of compression you desire. Keep in mind these are about what you can expect, and that no two installations are identical. 
Other handy features included with Sound Recorder include Editing features to remove parts before and after a given position on a given recording, even join two different files together. You can also add echo and other effects. These effects generally are done on files in the PCM format and usually before any additional compression is added to the audio. Two factors to keep in mind when editing sounds. The first being if you keep saving the results as different files you should be able to go back to the sound you started with. Second, it is unlikely you can take a very compressed file say at 7 kb/sec and convert it back to 56 kb / sec and have good audio. Or to put it another way you can always go down on the sound quality without much problem, however going up on the sound quality has limitations due to noise and loss from compression. You do not reduce file size in some cases by 90% and not have some downside.
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12-18-01