Skip to main content

Record what you hear - using Audacity

This technique is a potential answer to one or more of the situations that could arise while trying to work with sounds / music on a computer, but with limited resources.

How to extract the audio from a video / movie ?
How to record what I play on a windows PC ? 
How to convert audio from one format to the other ?
How to extract the audio from a Youtube movie ?

The answer:
* Windows provides for accessing the signal going from the soundcard to the speakers, through what it calls a 'Stereo Mix', you just have to point your recording software to use the 'Stereo Mix' instead of the microphone. Voila!, any sound that you can hear on the computer can also be recorded.

Step by step procedure for doing this is below.

The software that use for recording is the well known Audacity. If you don't have it yet, I recommend you download it. Its a great software. (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)

Step 1:
Add and enable 'Stereo Mix' to the group of Recording Devices. Either, right click on the Sounds icon in the taskbar or go to Control Panel -> Sounds. Choose Recording Devices. If 'Stereo Mix' doesn't appear in the list, right click anywhere on the list and make sure the 'Show Disabled Devices' option is checked. (see Screenshot 1)

Step 2:
Open Audacity (restart if its already open). Go to Edit menu -> Preferences and in the 'Audio I/O' tab change the Recording | Device: to 'Stereo Mix'. (see Screenshot 2)

Now you are all set.

Step 3:
Click on the record button in Audacity. Start playing the whatever you wish to record !! (see Screenshot 3)

Note: Audacity, at the time of writing is still immature on Windows, so make sure you save your project often enough.

Screenshot 1




Screenshot 2




Screenshot 3



last updated: 08 January 2012. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jump start into Character Recognition - Part 1

Motivation The dawn of computers and their integration into a huge network called the internet has accelerated the sharing of knowledge like never before. However, there exists a divide between the forms of expression familiar to us and the forms in which the information can be fed in at a computer terminal. For example, when writing about scientific material we make extensive use of diagrams to convey the ideas, but, feeding a graphic into the computer, requires special effort and doesn't come naturally. These and other aspects have always been a matter of concern for me, being someone fond of publishing on the web whatever I know :) Any how, the aim of this article and other in this series is not to demonstrate my solution to the above problem ... instead to attract young and curious minds to the problem so that they may contribute to it solution. Start The plan is to build, step by step, a very simple, character recognition program which would take a simple text file contai...
Post a Comment
Read more