XP recording app needed
November 17, 2005 1:29 PM   Subscribe

I would like to know of software which can record sounds on a PC XP - but, it needs to be able to record any and all sounds. E.g. the sound from a web site playing in flash, or last.fm or pandora. I am not a big fan of going the analog patch way. Any ideas?
posted by bright77blue to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)
 
Any recording software will do this, even sound recorder. In your Volume Control, select 'What you hear' or 'Stereo Mix' as your active recording channel.
posted by Jairus at 1:33 PM on November 17, 2005


No analog patch... as in you don't want wav files, you want the source files?
posted by holloway at 1:54 PM on November 17, 2005


holloway, I assume he/she means that he doesn't want to run a patch cable from the line out to the line in.
posted by Jairus at 1:56 PM on November 17, 2005


Ah, ok. I never even considered someone would try that!

In that case Audacity also works well.
posted by holloway at 1:59 PM on November 17, 2005


Pandora stores the MP3's you hear on your hard drive in the cache.

http://alexkpatterson.blogspot.com/2005/11/free-music-from-pandora.html
posted by skrike at 2:14 PM on November 17, 2005


I'd reccomend audacity, it's opensource and free, lets you record "what you hear" and saves to wav, ogg, mp3 (after slight hacking - i pointed the file it wanted to my winamp plugin folder). you can set the record quality (48khz, stereo, 32bitfloat so it sounds nice) in the prefrences but you should close and reopen before it'll change.
posted by psychobum at 2:38 PM on November 17, 2005


Total Recorder ($12 or so) has the advantage of grabbing digital streams directly. Some programs let the sound convert to analog and then redigitize it, losing quality.
posted by StickyCarpet at 3:37 PM on November 17, 2005


I'll also suggest Replay Music from Applian Technologies. It's another tool, like Total Recorder and Audacity, that records audio streams to disk, in MP3 format. It has auto track separation and CDDB info retrieval.

It's try-before-you-buy and costs about 30-40 dollars.
posted by dott8080 at 8:40 PM on November 20, 2005


« Older How to clean a pond of algae?   |   What interesting thing can I do with 200 notebooks... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.