I was wondering if anyone knew of a program that was flexible enough to allow schedule timed recording of events from multiple sources that might overlap.

i.e.

record source A from 3pm to 5pm
record source B from 4pm to 6pm

all the little apps i've seen won't allow you to do the overlapping part. of course you would be encoding 2 streams simultaneously, so the processing overhead would be greater.

sources would be different inputs, potentially from different soundcards or other sources.

possibly, a program which allowed multiple instances of itself would work in this way....

thoughts?

dan

Before you even consider whether there are any programs capable of doing this, you first have to verify whether the two separate sources can be active simultaneously. If they are two inputs on a single soundcard, my feeling is that in most cases you won't be able to record from them at the same time. Most soundcards only allow one source line to be active for recording. Those that allow multiple recording lines to be active still tend to mix them and deliver a single stream. So I reckon it'll only work if you have two separate soundcards.

As for software that will do the job, I think you're right that you need to find a program that allows multiple instances. Not only that, you may find that even running multiple instances would still interfere with each other (eg. registry or INI settings). I know that if you tried this using Wave Repair (which does have a timed recording facility, by the way), you'd need to install it in two separate folders so they'd each have their own INI file.

Just a quick follow-up. I installed a second soundcard in one of my machines to try this out, and can confirm that you can do what you want with Wave Repair, subject to the following conditions:

1. Separate soundcards for the two recording streams.
2. Install Wave Repair twice, into separate folders, and configure the two copies to use the different soundcards. The need for this (rather than just firing up two instances of Wave Repair) is because it stores the selected soundcard in an INI file in the installation folder.

Note that if all you want to use Wave Repair for is recording to hard disk, it's free.

I see no reason why the same technique shouldn't work with any other recording program, provided you can have multiple installations which don't overwrite each other's settings. Or failing that, use two different recording programs (on the assumption that they will keep out of each other's way).

Total Recorder?? Ask the website (HighCriteria).