In this tutorial, I will be showing you how to capture any sound/audio that is played through your computer's speakers. Yes, this theoretically means you could record songs from music websites such as last.fm, purevolume.com, or rhapsody.com, but I am not advocating that!
Hah, ok let's begin!
Things you will need:
Any working sound card with the drivers installed,
And a free program called Audacity.
The first thing you will need to do is download Audacity and install it on your computer. I am using version 1.2.6.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Once you have Audacity installed and running, click the drop down bar in the top right corner and select “Stereo Mix”. Then crank the volume up to full, 1.0. This will set your sound card to capture audio directly as it is played, and record it in real time. The resulting sound is much better than an input from a microphone or other line in device would be, as it is grabbing the raw waves.
Now that Audacity is set to intercept audio streams, you will probably want it to record in Stereo instead of the default, Mono. To enable dual channel recording, click “Edit” on the top menu, and then the “Preferences” item. On the “Audio I/O” tab, select “2 (Stereo)” as the channel setting.
If you want to export the audio as an MP3 track, you will need to download and locate the “LAME MP3 Codec” It can be found
here, and when unzipped, the “lame_enc.dll” file should be placed in the “Audacity/Plug-ins” folder. Then just click find library on the “File Formats” tab and navigate to the Plug-Ins directory. 128 Kbps is the preferred bit rate for audio quality vs. file size.
Now you are all set up to hijack some audio. Just click the record button and Audacity will start doing its thing! Any audio played in the background will be captured by Audacity and graphed as separate left and right channels below.
When you are done recording, you can select the beginning and end of the track with the cursor tool, and press delete to remove the silent areas. Also feel free to play around with some of audio effects and other goodies.
To save your work, go to File, “Export as MP3”
Have fun!
