Do you see that first drop-down box, the one that says “MME” right now? Now look at the upper left corner, at the bar right underneath the controls for stopping, pausing, etc. When you’re done, open it up if you haven’t already. Now just follow the dialogs to install Audacity. You may need to tell Windows again that you really, honestly, do want to run the installer, but eventually you should get to the language selection dialog. Tell Windows that you really do want to run the installer: Once you’ve downloaded the file, run the installer: A feature was recently added that lets you choose a sound output device as an input device – so for instance, you can choose your speakers as your microphone.
This lovely open-source sound recording and editing program runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8, and is also available for other platforms, though the protocol for recording sound output is probably different on different operating systems. Finally, there’s SoundLeech, which is very simple to use and lets you still output your sound normally, but doesn’t work in all situations. Secondly, you can use VB-Audio Virtual Cable (catchy name, I know), which also works dependably, but is more complicated to use and can’t keep playing your sound normally unless you install extra programs. First, you can use Audacity, which is fairly simple, works in all situations, and lets you still output your computer’s sound through your normal speakers/headphones/whatever it is. I’m going to show you the three methods I’ve come across, in order of how good I think they are. But despair not! There is a free solution. Which perhaps is fine if you intend to be recording sound output a lot, but not for me, who only needs to once in a while. What if I want to record my computer’s sound output? I can use the microphone to record what’s coming out of the speakers…but there’s naturally going to be a large loss of quality, since the sound has to go through both my bad speakers and my bad microphone. It would be much better to to have software on my computer directly record what’s coming out of my computer. If you do a little searching, you’ll find lots of people saying, “Oh, just use Audacity and select ‘Stereo Mix’ or something of the sort as the microphone!” Sorry…but not all computers support that – including mine! You will probably also find various programs that promise to record sound output…but that you have to, like, pay for. This is a tricky question I’ve bumped up against multiple times. I added this method below and generally revamped the article. Update on 12 August 2014: In the comments, Riverlandsmj alerted me to another, simpler way to record your computer’s sound output while still playing it through normal speakers. I’ve left it up in case it’s useful to you, but there are no guarantees that it’s accurate anymore (or that I still think it’s comedic). WARNING: This post is more than 7 years old.
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