Capturing Streaming Audio in Audacity

One of the most rewarding things about working as an Elearning Catalyst Teacher is learning new technologies and new ways of using old technologies.  I'm sure some folks just assume we were born with the background required for the job, but in actual fact, we're frauds; most of the ideas we bring to the table we've learned from the teachers and students we work with.  So, credit for this Tech Tip goes to the students of Vanguard School, who showed it to my colleague Rob Geiger, who then passed it on to the rest of us.

Frequently, when students are creating a PowerPoint or other multimedia presentation, they want to accompany it with music.  All too often when we ask them if they have the song they want to use on hand, the answer is, "Yeah, right here on Youtube."  In the past, members of Elearning have advised students that incorporating streaming audio from the Internet into a PowerPoint presentation is simply too difficult to bother with.  This tech tip changes that.

The solution that the Vanguard students passed on to Mr. Geiger involves setting up Audacity to capture the incoming audio stream.  Then, within Audacity users can render the audio as an MP3 file and easily incorporate it into their multimedia presentation.   While the solution, as it's presented in the tutorials below, looks at capturing audio from a Youtube video, the technique works for any streaming audio source.

An Ethical Consideration:  Admittedly, we are venturing into a very grey ethical area here, one I'm sure the RIAA would frown on.  Let's be clear that I am not recommending this as a means of compiling your music collection, nor would I suggest this for any presentation that would be published to a scope larger than the classroom.  I do believe, however, that there is an argument to be made that using it for the limited, educational purpose of a classroom presentation falls within the category of fair use.

Below, you will find two video tutorials, one for Windows XP computers and the other for Windows 7 computers.   If you are running Windows Vista, you can probably adapt; you will not have to run the beta version of Audacity, as you would in Windows 7, but you will have to make similar adjustments (to those found in the Win 7 tutorial) in the Sound Control Panel. If you would prefer to watch the videos in a larger format, click on the links in this paragraph to view them in Youtube.

Capturing Streaming Audio in Windows XP




Capturing Streaming Audio in Windows 7