I don't think anyone used Windows Sound Recorder for anything serious. It had a built in maximum record length for starters (I think to prevent piracy?).
Sound Forge was my preferred editor for years before Audacity matured. Cool Edit was ok, but I seem to recall it had a bizarrely over-designed UI that made the thing feel more like a toy than a serious tool. Particularly when compared to the much older and more feature rich (at that time) Sound Forge. It took a while before Cool Edit really became competitive and by that point I was already using Audacity.
I do still miss some features of Sound Forge even now. Though I don't tend to do too much with audio editors these days compared to the stuff I was doing in the 90s and 00s.
> It had a built in maximum record length for starters (I think to prevent piracy?).
It was somewhat related to the memory the computer had. I think it tried to store audio all uncompressed in memory. At the very least it varied a lot between different machines. I remember trying it in a super low spec machine and it could record up to about 5s max.
Sound Forge was my preferred editor for years before Audacity matured. Cool Edit was ok, but I seem to recall it had a bizarrely over-designed UI that made the thing feel more like a toy than a serious tool. Particularly when compared to the much older and more feature rich (at that time) Sound Forge. It took a while before Cool Edit really became competitive and by that point I was already using Audacity.
I do still miss some features of Sound Forge even now. Though I don't tend to do too much with audio editors these days compared to the stuff I was doing in the 90s and 00s.