[Simon]

A colleague here at work would like to record some audio off the web (I think it's from a YouTube clip).

Now we managed to find Audacity which allows him to record the audio while it's playing. But if you play it over the speakers and record it with the built-in microphone it doesn't sound very good. If you use two Macs and route the sound over the audio-out into the other Mac's audio-in it sounds better, but it's still not great and the solution isn't very nice either.

We then found WireTap Pro which claims to be able to route the audio to a file rather than play it through the speakers. This is excatly what he would like to do. Unfortunately it's not free or OSS. Does anybody here know of a free and open tool that would allow him to record audio w/o using the speaker or microphone?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

[JonoMarshall]

You need Audio Hijack Pro...

Click me!

[Jacke]

Though Audio Hijack doesn't seem to be free either...

Another option would be to use the Soundflower freeware, which can create "virtual connections" between audio systems (I use it to route audio from the built-in audio to my Firewire interface since Stepmania doesn't work with Firewire audio). I just tried it, recording in Garageband, and it works fine.

[JonoMarshall]

It's free.. you'll just get static if you try and record past 10 minutes of audio without registering.
(Most YouTube's are less than 10 minutes right? - you can always record 9.59 of sound then use audacity to splice the two tracks together... not the most elegant of solutions though!)

Try it, it's a great app, it's in my top 5 useful apps alongside... VLC, Jumpcut, Snapz and Dragster.
(I've happily registered all of them, long live the independants!)

[Simon]

Nice suggestions, guys. Thanks a lot!