I'm scanning family photos to my computer's hard drive. Going to burn them all into disc for the family someday. Lots and lots of photos. I have a Pentium 4, Windows XP, and a hard drive way bigger than I ever thought I'd use. So, the older members of my family look over my shoulder and tell stories about the crumbling old pictures. Good stories. Funny. Informative. Stuff that ought to be preserved, but I don't do stenography.

I figure I can put over a thousand photos on a CD-R, but it occurred to me I should try to record some of these stories too. And preserve the voice print along with the visual print of these folks. But I have no experience with modern recording.

There's some inexpensive software out there that says it can do it all, so I guess I could hook a mic into a USB port or do tape recordings and line them in somehow, but I was wondering about storage space. What format should I use (MPEG, WAV?). This is the stuff I know nothing about. Can't you compress the heck out of sound files? Most of the photos I'm storing are around 300-400 KB. Can I store sound files that would be intelligible at that size?

Any suggestions on software, type of mic and how to line it in (can I use a USB port?), compression methods, type of file and so on would be appreciated.

Found this software that says it can do it all.

http://www.mp3towav.org/i-Sound-WMA-MP3-Recorder-Professional/