Polarity Music has released Polarity-Recorder, a FREE background audio recorder

Developer Polarity Music releases Polarity-Recorder, a free background audio recorder for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Polarity Music is an expert on all things Bitwig, a champion of open-source projects, and a fantastic musician/producer with lots of interesting content on his YouTube channel.

Polarity-Recorder is a ring recorder that sits in the background, capturing audio so that you never lose any of those happy accidents.

On paper, Polarity-Recorder is a simple idea, and the best ones usually are, but it has a few additional features that make this plugin a potential gem.

First of all, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at the keyboard trying to remember something I played earlier (as expected, the thing I forgot is instantly placed on a pedestal as the greatest thing I’d ever do, if only I could remember it).

Now, I use a few instruments that automatically capture some audio, like Pianoteq 9, and I regularly turn to that feature.

The downside is that, without the luxury of forgetting, it turns out some of the things I played aren’t the greatest thing ever. But now and then, it captures something I’m so happy I didn’t lose.

As a ring recorder, Polarity-Recorder captures a set length of audio ranging from one to twenty minutes.

What makes this recorder more interesting is that you can edit audio and set clip metadata inside the plugin.

In addition to the basic trim/cut/reverse edits, you can do things like normalise to peak or integrated LUFS.

You can browse captured clips, edit, and export the results.

When editing a clip, you can set some important details, like whether it’s a specific instrument or full mix, and whether it’s a loop or a one-shot.

To make things easier, Polarity Recorder uses markers that identify start positions and bars; this is one of my favourite features.

If you’re using Polarity Recorder on a track in your DAW, you have the tempo from your project, and these markers make it much easier to create one-shot or looped samples.

The recorder is a great way to capture the happy accidents that would otherwise be lost, and there’s nothing worse than losing a great idea.

Well, there are worse things, but it’s certainly not good!

Well done, Polarity.