VirtualRecorder is an Android application meant to record live audio, much like the old tape or Digital voice recorders. I’ve been using VirtualRecorder to record audio conferences and lectures but when you want to play it back on your pc, you may find that the resulting pcm file is not recognized by any standard audio player on your computer. This is because the file is a raw audio file that music players do not know how to play and in most cases can’t even recognize. To be able to play back the Virtual Recorder pcm file, you will need a designated audio software or editor that will be able to play and convert the file to a different format for better accessibility.

The most convenient (and free) application, both to play and convert raw audio files is Audacity, available for download here. The application is supported on Windows, Mac and various variants of Unix and Linux, if you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, be sure to download version 1.3 and up (currently in beta), since they are supported only from this version on. Once Audacity is installed on your system we can move on to loading and converting VirtualRecorder’s pcm files.

Importing the pcm file:
- First copy the pcm files from your device memory card, located in the VirtualRecorder folder, to your computer.
- Open Audacity, go to File –> Import –> Raw Data… and choose the pcm file you want to convert.
- In the Import Raw Data menu choose the following:
Encoding: Signed 16bit PCM
Byte order: Little Endian
Channels: 1 Channel (Mono)
Sample rate: 22050 Hz
- You can set the Start offset and Amount to import as you wish. To import the entire file leave them both at default values (0 and 100, respectively).
- Click the import button.

Now you can listen to the audio track using Audacity, or convert it using the application’s export capability. To export the track, go to File –> Export… Choose the format to which you want to export, a wide variety of formats is supported (WAV, MP3, AIF, OGG, FLAC, AC3, WMA and more) and save the file.