You may remember that I did a round up of Windows Phone sound recorders a while back? Audio Recorder Pro came in top of the heap by some margin, but the competition has been applying itself and we now have a huge update to The Sound Recorder, with a summarised changelog below. Add in Nokia's HAAC microphones and your Windows Phone is now better than ever at capturing both music and conversations.

From the Store entry:

The Sound Recorder app helps you record, store and share voices from your device's microphone.

*FREE & FULLY FUNCTIONAL*
*LIGHT WEIGHT, RELIABLE, EASY TO USE*
*SUPPORTS SAMPLE RATE UP TO 96 kHz*
*HIGH CLARITY STEREO & MONO RECORDING*
*SKIP SILENCE WHILE RECORDING*

The utility is free, thanks to banner ads on-screen, which don't really get in the way too much. Here's a summarised changelog for the brand new v1.7.1703 since we last covered this application:

• Option to choose mono sample rate (right up to 96kHz stereo, higher quality audio with the slight downside of larger capture files)
• Multiple file operations, including 'playing files', 'move to media library', 'delete file', etc.
• Option to automatically save to media library
• Jump to any part of a recording by tapping/moving the slider (this was the big limitation in the previous version)
• Option to provide default file name
• Removed non-required dependencies
• Asynchronously writes to file (so more reliable when other stuff is happening in the background on your phone)
• Improved error handling
• Optimisations

And some screens of it in use now:

Showing recording in progress - note the dB indicator - moving a recording out of The Sound Recorder's sandbox and into the Windows Phone 'file system - and setting high sampling rates for higher quality recording.

You can download The Sound Recorder here.