Let’s say you’re listening to an Internet radio station and it’s streaming music through their proprietary Flash player. You want to record this audio so you can take it with you on-the-go, say, on your iPhone or iPod. But it’s streaming, so you can’t download it. So you’re dead, right?

Nope! Audacity to the rescue. You can use Audacity to record your computer’s streaming audio. This simply an amazing audio recording application - and, best of all, it’s totally free! If I had time to take on an open source project, and I actually had the skills to do so, Audacity would be very high on my list. It’s simply awesome.

It works wonderfully as an audio recorder. It can import MP3s with no problem. You can save MP3s with the free LAME encoder, which you have to download separately due to legal restrictions, I believe. But it works really well, and I’m really thankful for it.

I’ve used plenty of other audio recorders. The built-in Windows one. CoolEdit 2000. RecordPad by NCH. NCH makes another audio recording app, too. They all suck in comparison to Audacity. In fact, this morning we were recording with NCH WavePad, I think it’s called, and it totally messed up the sermon audio recording. It was a pretty great sermon, too. It seemed to save a file, but it has a size of 0 (zero)! And, of course, when I try to open the .wav file, it says it’s corrupt.

Today’s lesson: NCH WavePad sucks. Next week I will push as hard as I possibly can to get Audacity installed on the computer. Until I find something better– and I’ll be quite surprised if I do– Audacity is the only way to go.

Not only does the program itself rock, their documentation rocks, too. I searched on Google for “audacity record computer audio” and found exactly what I was looking for.

The input device to record my own computer’s audio wasn’t there by default (I’m using Vista), but following the instructions on their wiki sorted it out straight away. No way I’d have found that myself.

One big caveat, though: don’t try to browse the web in another window or other tabs when playing audio on the Flash audio player! It skips when the browser is working, so the audio gets messed up. Of course, Audacity records exactly what you’re hearing, so if the website skips, it’ll skip in the recording, too.

By the way, the audio mixer in Windows Vista totally rocks, too. This is a good enough reason to get Vista, in my opinion. Older computers might be able to handle it, but if you’re getting a new computer, Vista is the only way to go. I don’t even like OS X in comparison– probably to the chagrin of my OS X-loving buddies.

Note: I have no idea what audio mixing OS X offers.