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IMHO, Winamp's
greatest feature is its versatility via plugins, and of course a
huge community of users who write plugins for it. I had been looking
for a simple way to capture audio from my mic to my HD, but most
tools out there were shareware with trial periods etc. and the only
tool I found, Absolute MP3 Recorder, refused to work on my system.
I finally turned to trusly ol' Winamp,
and found a wonderful plugin called Line-In Plugin (Winamp
download) by Jasper van de Gronde (email,
homepage)
that allows, well, audio from in line and mic to be played in Winamp.
Then it was a simple matter of using the Nullsoft Disk Writer Plugin
(comes with Winamp)
and choosing the appropriate audio capture settings on the input
plugin. If you have problems with this, I have step by step instructions
below.
- Download and install Winamp
Line-In plugin using the links above.
- Open the Preferences window by pressing Ctrl+P and choose Input
under Plugin from the left column. Choose the Line-In Plugin.
- Configure the Line-In plugin. A readme file comes with the plugin
and is stored in the plugins directory, usually C:\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins\.
Use Ctrl+L to open the location window and type in the settings
of your choice. I used these settings:
line://srate=22,bps=8,nch=1,time=1200
These give me fairly decent voice recording for 20 mins, @ 1.26MB/min
which doesn't kill my HD.
- Choose Output from Plug-ins and choose the Disk Writer plug-in.
Use the Configure button to decide where to store the audio. I
would recommend making sure that the max. recording time does
not fill up your hard drive. Bad things can happen if your system
drive is full.
- Now you should see a "song" in your playlist. Playing
it will start the recording, pausing will hold, and stopping will
write it to disk.
- Switch your Output back to whatever it was before (DirectSound
or waveOut are common). You are done :-) Encode the wave file
into the format of your choice, like Ogg Vorbis or MP3 for reduced
space requirement.
Special thanks to the Winamp
team and Jasper van de Gronde.
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