A Sound Idea.

Doorstop · A Sound Idea.

Just thought I'd pass on this wee bit of knowledge.

I was looking online for a copy of the album UnClubbed to do a wee, y'know, sneaky download but unfortunately it was nowhere to be found.

I had previously listened to the album in its entirety on Spotify .. (a great wee program incidentally - if you like your music and haven't tried it I strongly suggest you do) .. and was just musing that I could listen to the whole album in CD quality using Spotify but couldn't actually keep a copy to put on my MP3 player or burn to disc etc and wouldn't it be a great idea if I could buffer any sound coming from my PC speakers and then subsequently dump the contents of the buffer into a folder in MP3 (or whatever) format.

So I went on a wee bug hunt and found this little doobry .. Audacity .. completely free and clean of nasties, no 'trial period' nonsense and completely un-crippled it allows you to do exactly what I described in the previous paragraph .. any sound that plays through your sound card is buffered to memory and can then be saved as MP3, WAV, OGG ect. In addition you can do any alterations to the sound file before you save it i.e. crop, hiss removal, bass boost, crackle removal - loads of stuff.

Really, really handy if a wee bit tricky to set up. It seemed, going by other accounts of installation procedures in online A/V forums, that it seems very dependant on particular system setups v.v. drivers, soundcards etc but I got there in the end with a fair old session of "ji-ji-jiggle it a bit Granvil" and now it's working an absolute treat.

A wee bit of work and I now have the said album playing away merrily on the 'puter and on the phones' MP3 player.

Very nice .. clever me.

cybers

If you are using vista open devices and right click on speakers and choose record what i hear

Don't know if it is only available in utimate version though...

Whilst not condoning piracy or music theft in general blah blah blah ....

Doorstop

I take it you're talking about a speakers option in device manager Cybers mate.

I don't seem to have that .. or the 'record what I hear' option either so it must be a Vista Ultimate only option.

james73

I have the "Record what You Hear" option in both Win XP and Win 2000 but it's
in Creative Playcentre, my soundcards software.

James H