Quoting Your Amish Daddy

Isn't sound recorder 16 bit?

I doubt it. The executable itself is called sndrec32, and I'm not even certain the NT kernel OSes (NT, 2000, and XP) can run 16-bit applications natively. Moreover if 16-bit was involved we'd see problems at 2^16 bytes = 64KB.

What you guys are most likely thinking of is 16-bit audio. Yes, sndrec32 can record in 8-bit and 16-bit audio (most sound cards can't input/output more precisely than 16 bits).


I would suggest instead that the sndrec32 problem is caused by a signed integer mistake in its programming.

The title of the MS KB article is:

You receive a "Not enough memory available to complete this operation" error message when you try to record a .wav file by using Sound Recorder

Here's an explanation. sndrec32 could store the amount of mem available into a signed integer, which has 31 bits of storage in addition to the sign bit. A huge unsigned value like 2.1GB has a '1' as the most significant bit, which doubles as the sign bit for signed integers, so 2.1GB and in fact every other value 2GB and over would look negative in signed form. So if the program compares mem_available < mem_needed, the expression could inadvertently evaluate true and the program would exit with an error like the one above. This mistake is probably easy to make because in C/C++, the signed integer is just called "int".

Quoting hoverbike

Although nobody really needs Sound Recorder (due to substitutes), I'm wondering if it might be an indication of a problem on a wider scale with other applications.

So my answer would be a similar mistake could potentially cripple any program until it got patched, but it's impossible to say how many programs like that are out there. The fact that we've heard about the problem only on a program as little used as sndrec32 indicates it isn't terribly widespread.

(I still have to decide 2gb vs 4gb myself so I'd be interested to hear more discussion)