Developer: HighCriteria
OS: Win 95/98/ME/NT/2000
Installed Size:  3.87MB
Function: Ripping

Here in America, we love Canada.  They give us good beer, cheap vacations, and excellent exchange rates.  They also give us Total Recorder, an inexpensive and powerful program to capture any audio going through your sound card that you can convert to MP3 with an external program.

Now, imagine you wanted to record an Internet telephone conversation, a streaming broadcast, music from your tape or LP, or music from your CD.  Now imagine you could easily with one program capture any of the above audio and archive it one your computer.  Imagine now that you could archive it in MP3 format on your computer or on a CD.  This is reality with Total Recorder.

The cool thing about this program is that it comes with a special driver that demands all audio run through it to be captured if you wish.  I tried it out on a popular Internet news site and was pleasantly surprised.  The captured and encoded MP3 audio sounded better than the original broadcast (probably something to do with my setup but cool nonetheless).  The program does not come with an encoder, but simply download the latest compiled version of LAME for free and you will be on your way.  When saving a captured stream, simply choose the 'Change' button to select to save in MP3 format.

The unregistered version of the program only lets you record 40 seconds of audio.  However, registration is only $11.95 US ($17.95 Canadian) which makes it very affordable and extremely cheap for what it can do.

  Try Total Recorder