Capturing Audio from your Mac

ByMike Moffit

As some of you may know, we have begun spreading the gospel of Small Dog through a new medium. And by “new” medium, I mean “very old” medium: radio. Small Dog Speaks! airs every Thursday from 1-2pm Eastern time on WDEV in historic and beautiful Waterbury, VT. For those of you who don’t live in Central Vermont, you should move here! Failing that, you can listen to the show online.

As the go-to guy for all things audio, it fell upon me to find a good way to record the show so that we could post it to our audio archives as soon as possible. There are a number of ways to get this done. The straightforward, old-fashioned way would be to put a microphone in front of a radio. Due to the uncertain nature of radio reception in the mountain valley we work out of and the problem of background noise, this was quickly abandoned as a possibility. I decided to find a more high tech solution.

I decided to find a way to record the online audio stream. I looked at GarageBand and Logic Pro and did not find a native way to record the audio from my computer. A quick internet search turned up a solution, though. Soundflower is a system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. It is free, open-source, and runs on Mac Intel and Power PC computers. Once installed, you can go into System Preferences > Sound and set your audio output to Soundflower. When you open your recording program (I use Logic Pro) you can then select Soundflower as the input source for your recording.

Please note that any sound that plays on your machine will be recorded so make sure to turn off audio alerts in any other programs you may be running. Also, your volume control will affect the signal level, so make sure to turn it all the way up and use the monitor controls in your recording program to control the monitor level.

Once I capture the audio, I convert it to mp3 and post it to our archives. I also take soundbites out of context and remix them. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Several of our readers have written me to recommend Audio Hijack Pro. The primary reason I did not use this program is the 10 minute limit on the free version. Also, because I am recording directly into Logic Pro, I have all of the editing and exporting features that I need. However, for those of you looking for a low cost option (only $32 for the paid version) for audio capture, editing, and exporting this seems like a good program.

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