Today’s tip is on capturing audio in Windows XP as an MP3 file. We’ll be using a small utility which provides easy usage from within batch files or in scheduled tasks, as well as when used directly.

The free utility we’ll use for capturing audio is called SoundCapture, and is available from here. This utility requires the lame_enc.dll, which can be downloaded from here and then placed in the same directory as SoundCapture.exe.

To use SoundCapture, you’ll need to first determine the sound card input you’d like to record from. These differ based on your sound card manufacturer, however typing SoundCapture /? from a Command Prompt will render a list of the inputs available to you. The bitrate, sample rate, title, and duration of the recording can all also be adjusted to your needs using the /br, /sr, /title, and /m /length parameters respectively. The final parameter passed is the name you’d like to call the resulting file.

Once you have determined the input to use, and decided on any optional parameters , you can start the recording using a command similar to this:

SoundCapture /in “Stereo Mix” /br 128 /title “Test Rec” /m /length 30 test.mp3

If your sound card has Stereo Mix as an input choice, you should be able to record anything which is playing through your PC’s speakers.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment.

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