I had a need to capture an event streamed via Real Audio the other day. While Total Recorder, the premier utility to capture anything and everything destined for the sound card, would have sufficed very nicely, I was looking for a freebie. Absolute MP3 Recorder (AMR) doesn’t work in the same way as TR, but it did the job.
AMR depends on the sound card’s ability to route the output to its input internally. It does this by switching in the sound card’s "Wave," "What-U-Hear" or "Stereo Mixer" recording source. To determine if your card has this: double-click on the speaker in the system tray then click Options, Properties, then click the "Recording" dot. If you find any one of these modes, activate it. You can then use Absolute MP3 Recorder.
This means there are several factors that must be observed. In my experiments, not having the volume controls set properly will cause the signal to be over-driven, making the recording sound like a cheap radio at full volume. Make several test recordings to find the best levels of the Master Volume and Stereo Mix (or whatever mode your card has).
AMR records to MP3 unless you check a box that says to save as WAV type. There are several other codec formulations available. The trip through the sound card means that a digital source, such a Real Audio stream, is converted to an analog signal first, sent back to the sound card’s input, and reconverted back to digital.
Before recording, make sure you have properly identified the formulation (sample-rate, bit-level, mono/stereo, etc) of the source and have selected the appropriate formulation for the output. For most recordings, the source formulation should match the destination formulation. For example, for a sound file destined to be burned to an audio CD (as opposed to a data CD holding MP3’s), the recording parameters should be 44.1KHz, 16-bit stereo as a WAV-type file.
The program has a somewhat minimalist layout. There is no help but there is a very short question and answer web page stored in the same folder as the program. The program stands alone, there are no registry entries, no system files. The user does not specify where the recordings are placed. The program puts them in a sub-folder below the programs folder. Therefore, if you intend to record a full audio CD track, make sure you have several multiples of 650MB in the same partition you installed AMR.
Set your recording events (did I mention you can set up ‘programs’ much like you program your VCR?), and AMR will supposedly connect to Internet for you. I can’t see how one manages to do this – further experiments are definitely in order.
Absolute MP3 Recorder v1.1.35
TechLogic
Works with any version of Windows but not all sound cards.
Freeware, 456KB download
