Recording sound output in Windows
January 16th, 2007
I can’t believe I didn’t find out about this trick until today. It would have prevented the need for all these hacks and placing the microphone next to the speakers to record sounds.
If you’ve ever tried to record streaming audio in Windows, like a Skype call or a webcast, you may be aware of a simple setting that allows you to record any sound playing through your computer’s sound card. All you have to do is:
- Select your sound properties through the control panel or the sound icon in your system tray.
- Click on the properties tab.
- Check the recording box.
- Make sure Wave Out Mix is selected (It’s sometimes called stereo mix, or mono mix).
- Now you should be able to set Wave Out as your default for recordings made by Audacity or other audio recording programs.
This is a fantastic and dead easy way to make short sound clips from Youtube or DVD videos, or maybe you want to broadcast music to a friend over MSN Messenger or Skype. Or Google for some soundboards and randomly insert clips of Tom Cruise or Darth Vader breathing in the middle of one of your phone calls.
The possibilities are endless.
I can’t imagine what would happen if both of you were using this trick though… I take no responsibility if your speakers end up on the other end of the room.
About the Author: Ken is a technology geek who spends too much time with mobile phones. Contact Me.
- Cool Stuff , Windows
- Comments(22)
Wow, never knew about this either. Very handy. Thanks!
You should have asked me!
hey! would i be able to do this if i do not have a sound card?!
Is there any way to make it so that I can record clips for more than 60 seconds?
[...] Just follow the following instructions and you’ll never have to buy music again. First visit This website and follow the instructions. Second, go to This website and follow the instructions. [...]
Thanks for your help.
How does this work for Vista? I’ve tried to follow the instructions as written but I don’t find a recording box or option for wave out.
Vista really sucks. It has some advanced stuff I don’t care about, and it misses sruff like this, stuff I do wanna do. Can you help me plz?
Thanks a lot…
This trick relly works…
Regards,
wow, i never knew this either !! so useful tahbks!
sir i have a problem of record sound from computer i plug the out line in th e pc in and sound is coming from pc speaker so tell me how i record a sound
so I’m guessing this doesn’t work in vista?
I use Windows XP and it doesn’t work for me as described. I can’t find the “recording box”. I can just set volumes.
What am I doing wrong? Does this depend on the audio driver I am using? Could you provide some screenshots with the dialogs and settings you are using?
it does work but it kinda sucks… i can’t turn of my mic to do this, so if i want to listen to what i’m recording in my speakers it will record the sound in the mic too…
for Vista, I did this: (and it works)
- Control panel
- Sound
- Recording Tab
- Rclick in the box, tick “show disabled devices”
- Mine was called “stereo mix”, but it could also be “wave OUt Mix” or “mono Mix” (as said above)
-Rclick that, enable it and there should be a little tick in a green circle by it. If not, highlight it and click “Set default”.
- That’s it, you’re done! Open sound recorder and away you go!
WOW
It is very easy, thank you very much. Really helpful
Greets
Hey, this is very neat indeed
All the other sounds perfect 
i just have one problem. I cant record the bass correctly. I always sound sloppy or something (very bad)
Trying some different methods now. ^^
Anyone know how to record a neat bass?
thanks for that. In Audacity you must uncheck ’software playback’ option in order to do this stereo mix recording, otherwise it will keep recording the playback of what you’re recording. It will not record correctly otherwise and I’m worried this might damage something.
I knew this before, but my problem is that I have input from mic, the sound is processed, effects are added, and then it is outputted. Stereo Mix doesn’t work, I get just noise, and no mic input. That’s the problem.
None of this works on laptops with Windows 7…so im still screwed.
thankyou thankyou thankyou! Ive spent the past few hours, trying to figure out how to do the opposite and turn “stereo mix” off! Yay now i can do multitrack recordings again, you’re a life saver!
Some of you (like me will not find this helpful because the mixer appears to have been disabled (even though it says it’s enabled) so…….
I finally found a solution for this. Open up sound from the control panel, I right clicked on the sound dialogue box to show the disabled devices and after a lot of messing about enabled the mixer. However having done this it still didn’t work – it appeared to have been disabled. However I found that if you click mixer then properties then advanced the default setting for sample rate and bit depth is 2channel 16bit 48000hz. As soon as I changed this to 2 channel 16bit 44100hz the mixer started working! The next problem was a horrible background noise that was present all the time the mixer was enabled. However by taking the level meter down to 7 under the levels tab, I was able to resolve this problem as well et voila! It all works and I can happily stream my soundcard output – spotify etc to my streamium which is connected to my stereo and I can record any stream at all.
This has taken me about two weeks to resolve so I thought I would share!