Windows Audio Capture

Anyone know of a very simple free tool to capture audio sent to Windows (i.e. not audio from line-in, mic, and other hardware.)

It's for capturing sound from the Ixalance (IXS) and Yamaha XG MIDI softsynth players.

Windows has Sound Recorder, but it records from hardware and I don't want to loopback sound through hardware.

I probably need something that intercepts audio before it's sent to the kernel (Vista).

MP3 Direct Cut?

You will have to (I don't know if it's the same on Vista as xp):

Go to volume control > options> adjust for recording and select the system mixer.

Will reboot into Windows and see what the system mixer's really called.

Thanks. I'll give that a try. I do prefer raw wav output though, which'll be transcoded into FLAC, after recording has ended. But MP3 is better than nothing.

I just tried another tool, Sound Capture, or something like that. It didn't cut it, at least not on my Vista machine. Horrible delays, jumps and latency.

GoddersUK wrote:

Will reboot into Windows and see what the system mixer's really called.

Sadly, I wasn't able to get this to work under Vista.

I see four methods so far:

1) Set up an analog loopback via line-in. That sucks though, as it means that the signal goes through DA and AD phases.

2) Set up a digital synchronous loopback via SPDIF. I can't do that though, as I lack the SPDIF input jack, and it's also not quite optimal.

3) Search for a loopback virtual input device driver for Vista.

4) Buy a soundcard with internal routing. But buying a soundcard for this purpose is too extreme.

That's all the ideas I've got at the moment. I don't understand why that isn't there from the outset, if that's a correct assumption. It's so incredibly useful to have. The DRM system will surely be able to safeguard protected content.

Maybe one could have an ASIO driver and force the output of the programs into it somehow, and then reroute the output of the driver to disk.

If it is possible, then please, someone enlighten me!

The funny thing is that I first tried to record it, and I didn't understand the volume was so low, until I noticed some strange background noise, and sure enough, it was my stashed-away microphone that had been recording.

LarryOsterman wrote:



Vista has a digital loopback device built into the OS.  Simply initialize a render endpoint in loopback mode and you'll be able to open a capture client that receives all the output from that endpoint.

It unfortunately means you'll have to write some code though .