Thursday 18 November 2010

Recording anything that gets played in your computer

I knew it was possible, but I had forgotten the details, so here they go...

Sometimes you might want to record audio played by an application in your computer (system sounds, music in a webpage, etc... basically anything that the computer can output to speakers/headphones). Recording that is actually very easy... In Ubuntu 10.04 I got the instructions from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio

I decided to try recording a song from Spotify (which is running inside Wine in my PC) using Audacity. The only extra software that I needed was PulseAudio Volume Control, and that was also the only one that I needed to configure.


When you start playing a song in Spotify and start recording in Audacity, it probably does not record anything, because Audacity will try to record from the "wrong" source. To route the sound properly, you just need to open the PulseAudio Volume Control and (while recording, otherwise this option is not available) change the option "ALSA Capture from" to "Monitor of Internal Audio Analog Stereo", as shown below, and Audacity will record them properly:


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