First I have to say great site. How can I capture audio streaming from the net and save it to my hard drive, and which program do you recommend for editing it once it’s saved? I use Windows Vista and also Mac OSX.
Freecorder is as the name implies a free audio recording program that will capture sound from your speaker so it can also record internet audio onto your computer’s hard drive. It’s only available for Windows so if you want to run it on your Mac you can do it through Parallels. It installs on your browser as a toolbar this is where the interface buttons are to do the recordings. During the installation it as ask if you want to install the toolbar on Internet Explorer or Firefox. This is the easiest way I know how to record internet audio.
When you install Freecorder it come with a little search box which I guess this is how they support the program and able to give it away for free. If you don’t like that than you could always disable the toolbar whenever your not using it to record streaming audio. In Internet Explorer or Firefox right click anywhere on the toolbar and un-check “Freecorder” toolbar.
There is a really good guide on the site but I can briefly go over it with you here:
- Install the toolbar
- Click on “Settings” to choose a destination for the audio, choose the output quality and format, there’s MP3 or Wav with different quality bitrates
- Press “Record” than start the internet stream to begin recording
- Press “Stop” when finished
Here are a few tips for running Freecoder on Vista:
- Run and install it on your Admin Account, for some reason I couldn’t get it to work on my regular user account.
- When recording you may need to press the “Record” button first than start playing audio in order to record.
And to edit the recorded audio there’s nothing better for free than Audacity. Works on all platforms including Mac and Linux. Enjoy and happy recording.