Before the internet and especially Napster arrived, cassettes were made on the radio. In practice, you kept the radio on on the stereo recorder with the cassette ready and, when the favorite song arrived, you pressed the record button being careful then, before the DJ spoke or there was an advertisement, to stop the recording in time.
In this way it was possible, after a few days and much careful work, to obtain a super compilation with the hits of the moment to be listened to through the cassette radio.
Although today there are many ways to make music CDs or MP3 collections, it is still possible to use the same concept of the old cassette recorded by the radio using the internet and the voice recorder of the Windows PC, which for the occasion becomes a standard music recorder or any other audio recorder program.
Using the PC, it is possible, thanks to a fantastic trick, to record anything you hear from the speakers of the computer in a file to listen to as many times as you want, to burn to CD or to be stored in the MP3 player or phone.
READ ALSO: Record audio and video on Chrome of sites and desktops, even with webcam and microphone
The trick is possible thanks to the installation of a virtual audio driver .
In practice, Windows is made to believe that there is a virtual microphone capable of capturing computer audio.
the microphone line of the PC will receive, as input audio, the one heard from the speakers and therefore everything that is heard by the computer will be recorded.
To prepare your PC to become a radio recorder for your web browser, Chrome, Firefox, Edge or any other, you need to install a program called VB-CABLE Virtual Audio Device .
The Download button goes to download a zip file to extract to a folder on the PC.
Inside the extracted folder, among other things, you will find the installation file which is different depending on whether you are using 32-bit Windows ( VBCABLE_Setup ) or 64-bit ( VBCABLE_Setup_x64 ).
being a driver, you must install it by pressing the setup file with the right mouse button and then choose to run it as administrator.
Then authorize the installation and let it go until the message asking to restart the PC comes out.
At this point, the virtual audio driver is installed and can be configured .
Right-click on the speaker icon near the clock on the Windows taskbar to open the configuration of the recording devices.
In the playback tab, set Cable-input as default (select it and then press the Default button).
The volume, in this case, is irrelevant because, unfortunately, you will not hear anything from the PC speakers anymore (this is the only drawback, but you can quickly organize the default between speakers and cable-input).
On the Registration tab, set the Cable-output driver as default.
Select Cable output, press Properties, then go to the levels tab and lower the Cable Output volume to 20 or a little more.
Also, on the Listening tab, make sure the " listen to device " option is not selected.
To test if it works, open a music or sound website and, keeping the recording device configuration window open, note if the bar indicating the audio turns green, indicating that there is sound activity.
Note that if the bar is solid green it means that too loud a sound is detected and the Cable Output volume level must be lowered.
To record PC audio, go to the Start menu and open the Windows voice recorder (which is an application in Windows 10) or another of the programs to record audio and sound from speakers or microphone and press the record button.
The voice recorder allows you to hear the recording directly from the application or even to open the m4a files that are created from the recordings and saved in the Sound recordings folder located under Documents .
Needless to say, the result is really perfect, with recordings without disturbances and identical to the original listening.
READ ALSO: Mix the microphone audio with PC sounds and music
