not as easy as I'd have thought

[calimac]

What I thought computers should be capable of doing is capturing or downloading audio feed that the computer is playing. What I'm interested in is the sound portion of musical YouTube files.

But apparently this is very difficult to do.

1. I already have a program on my computer called Free Sound Recorder, which comes from here. You click a record button to start it. I clicked the button, started playing the YouTube file, and unclicked the button when it was done; I got a blank and soundless file. I checked the help files under "Recording Internet broadcasts (streaming audio)." It said, "Start the Sound Recorder and select the appropriate sound source." This is where I got stuck, because I could find no command for selecting the sound source. I need a help file for the help file.

2. The same company has another program called Audio Extractor. Perhaps that's what I want. I downloaded it, brushed away all the queries asking me to also load various malware, and got stuck at the registration stage, which refused to complete.

3. I tried a program called Streaming Audio Recorder, which comes from here. This was a bear to download, as the download kept shunting off into subsidiary downloads, one of which was called Microsoft .NET, and which got stuck several times, so I had to cancel and start over. But eventually it loaded, and the program works. You enter the URL and it siphons up a 20-minute sound file in about 2 minutes and deposits it as an MP3 on your computer. Terrific. Of course, I had to use my computer's Search for Files function to find where on my computer it had deposited it.

But then I discovered that, if I try to play one of the files, it merely crashes my computer's MP3 player. Other MP3 files, that I've ripped from CDs using a different program, do not crash the MP3 player.

Is there, like, a way you can actually do this simple task?

Comments

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

I can tell you what has worked for me. It's harder than it should be (probably on purpose, to make record companies happy.)

For recording, I use a thing called Audacity. I use it because it's the same thing I use to record from LPs, and it has tools for removing scratch noise. I almost hate to recommend it because it's so complicated, but it does appear to be very reliable and does have options for selecting the input to record from. It's free, and the downloads from audacityteam.org have been unpolluted by malware, etc. in my experience.

Setting it up to make MP3s is a bit tricky but well described on Audacity's online help pages. (The complication is because an outfit in Germany claims to own patents on MP3, the fact that MP3 is more than 17 years old and US patents that old should all be expired doesn't seem to faze them, so you have to download the free MP3 encoder -- charmingly called "LAME" -- from a separate website in a country that doesn't recognize the patents.)

The last hurdle is to figure out what to select as input. This actually depends on your sound card and drivers. I've had ones call it "what you hear" and others "stereo mix". You also want to go to the recording selector/level controls and make sure all the inputs like microphone and line in are disabled or turned down (otherwise ambient noise can be recorded.)

Finally, it's possible that the sound card drivers don't have an internal loopback like "what you hear" or "stereo mix". Haven't seen this for a while, but it was common some years ago. (Since that Streaming Audio Recorder worked as far as it did, you probably don't have that problem.) However, if you do, the solution is to get a patch cable with stereo mini phone plugs on each end (called 3.5mm or 1/8") and plug one end into the speaker/headphone output and the other into the line in jack, and record from the line in jack. This method is a pain, besides needing the cable it means you can't listen to what you're recording, Audacity does show a waveform graph so you can at least tell if there's anything there at all.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

When Apple refused to support Flash on iOS devices, it forced YouTube and other video sites to support MPEG-4 (.mp4) files in addition to Flash (.flv). I use the excellent ClickToFlash extension in Mac Safari to prevent Flash from loading automatically. It lets me choose among the available video formats, and I can even choose to download the video file and watch it off-line. Once you have an mp4 file, it is easy to drop it on Audacity and save the sound track as an mp3. Sadly, I cannot recommend an equivalent to ClickToFlash on Windows. I've looked, but what I saw at the time ranged from crummy at the best down to stuff that looked really creepy. Caveat downloader.

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

In Windows world: for recording streaming audio going through the sound card, I used the program Total Recorder for about a decade. The "Professional" version costs about $30 and it was possibly the most useful software I ever paid for. Total Recorder always worked flawlessly, through Windows 2000, XP and (I think?) Win 7; there was a bit of a learning curve though when I started with it. I'm sorry you're having problems... TR has an evaluation mode where one can install it and get it working to try it out; it produces recordings with burbles or dropouts introduced until you unlock the program with a paid license, but this means the buyer can have some assurance that TR will work as intended.

I have pretty much abandoned Total Recorder for the Windows port of get_iplayer, which is an emulator for the BBC audio application, because pretty much the only Internet audio I tape any more is from the BBC. Total Recorder works in real time, while get_iplayer works much faster than real time.

None of this does you any good, I'm afraid, if I remember correctly that you are in the Mac world.