Recording audio sound on Pc

A._Badger

buglawton wrote: »

Lucky you have an XP machine, as Windows 7 & newer prevents this.

I do it all the time on a new Dell Laptop running W7.using Total Recorder.

almillar

Wav is pure uncompressed audio - perfect sound, but massive and a waste of hard drive space.
You need to compress it. If it's from YouTube, it's already compressed, and a 256KB/sec MP3 file will be all you need. Better, more efficient than MP3 is AAC (MP4), which should sound better for the same bitrate (256KB/sec above). Those are both called 'lossy' formats, as some information is lost, to make the file smaller - stuff that you're not meant to be able to hear. You then have lossless formats which keep more info in, but obviously use more space. FLAC is an example. JPEG is lossy compression, .ZIP files are, of course, lossless - you can't remove ANYTHING from computer files!
So - take your pick is the short answer.

buglawton

My Lenovo is blocked for this reason - they did a deal with M$:
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=HT003577
Total recorder has an evaluation version that I may try as it supposedly gets around the block using some sort of virtual soundcard driver.