Sharif Don’t Like It

A classic rock parody for your Tuesday morning:

Recording your computer’s audio on OS X

Periodically, I come across some noise my computer’s making that I really want to capture.  Sometimes it’s from a flash movie I’m watching, or a sound effect from a video game I really liked.  I’m aware that there are a number of nice rippers out there, but my google searches tend to turn up a lot of results that are specific to an application (ex: rip youtube audio) ect.  This coupled with my lack of time to learn a new piece of software has in the past lead me to the following ugly solution:

Recently I stumbled across Soundflower, an audio routing tool for OS X. There’s a ton of useful stuff you can do with it (sound normalization, etc) but the first thing I did was use it to yank sounds more easily with less distortion. When you install it, it appears as another audio input and output. Hence you can set your input and output devices to Soundflower:

Then fire up your favorite sound recorder (I’m using Audacity, a free sound recorder), click record and you’re done:

Fast, easy simple. I’m sure there’s a better way and long term I’ll find it, but for the moment I’m happy.