Extracting the characteristics of recording devices from audio signals is a frontier in judicial comparative research and audio forensics.As a research hotspot of audio forensics, recorder recognition technology is disturbed by environment, semantics, speaker and other factors. This paper introduces the development, basic theory and structure of recording equipment research. Especially, the research status of non-speech segment detection, feature parameters, recognition model and database construction is introduced and analyzed. Finally, the shortcomings and prospects of recorder identification are discussed. It is considered that the next stage should focus on how to speed up the database construction and the application of deep learning in recorder recognition.