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If you can hear the music playing through your computer then it’s possible to make a recording of that music. OK, it’s not as easy as downloading a track and in a way it’s probably more difficult than going to The Pirate Bay, using Limewire or your favourite NZB indexer. However if there’s a particular track you want and can’t find anywhere else this is a possible solution, a slightly long winded one at that.

Getting Set Up

First things first, you’ll want to install Audacity, visit the Audacity site and download the latest version, run through the usual setup and install process. Once finished download and run the Lame MP3 installer. This basically just places a copy of the lame_enc.dll on your system. You need this to be able to encode MP3 files.

Assuming these two installs have gone correctly you’ll need to make a couple of one-off settings. Fire up Audacity. Click on Edit > Preferences and make sure that your sound card is selected for the Playback and Recording Device, and that the Recording Channels is on “2 (Stereo)”.

Click on the “File Formats” tab and then the “Find Library” button, a message will pop-up talking about MP3s.  Click “Yes”.

If you’ve installed the Lame MP3 installer with default settings, browse to “Program FilesLame for Audacity” and you should see “lame_enc.dll”. Select this file and click “Open”. Now click OK to confirm and close the Preferences window.

Last thing, make sure that along the top bar “Stereo Mix” is selected.

OK That’s Audacity set up to record. You won’t need to carry out any of the above steps again.

How to record a song to MP3

So presuming Audacity is already open. Run Spotify and find the song you want.

Don’t play the song yet, position the Spotify window and Audicity window next to each other.

OK, now press the record button and immediately afterwards press play on Spotify. You should see sound waves on audacity as it records. Let the song play to finish and click the stop button on Audacity.

OK, now in Audacity go to File > Export and MP3 choose a file name and click save, and confirm the export as MP3. Enter you ID3 tags if wanted. You’re MP3 will then be exported.

Tidying up

Audacity will also let you select areas of the recording to export as MP3, so if you wanted you could play and entire album and then select each section that represents a song and export it.

The Dreamcast is still one of my favourite consoles of all time, despite it’s issues some of the games were awesome (Jet Set Radio, Ready to Rumble). It was also the first time I’d ever browsed The Web on a TV set, albeit very blurry on those pre-HDTVs. Also it was about a week after launch before I could connect to the Sega Service due to the high demand.

Anyway, this morning I saw these two great videos about the rise and fall of Sega’s last console, definitely worth a watch.

Nintendo’s new DSi has officially been announced, it boasts some new features such as SD card support, two cameras and slightly larger screens, whilst at the same time being 12% slimmer than it’s predercessor the DS Lite.

Here’s a list of the new Nintendo DSi features:

• Larger Screens (increased from 3 inches to 3.25 inches)
• Built in SD Memory Card Support
• Built in Web Browser Application (Most likely Opera)
• MP3 Support
• Front facing VGA camera
• External 3 Mega Pixel Camera

Whilst the hardware is 12% slimmer it is missing the GBA slot, however if you like your GBA games that much you can pick up a GBA really cheap now days.

Various images can be found here: http://n-europe.com/news.php?nid=12393

Accorsing to some sources shortly there will be an annoucement that Google is to acquire Source game engine developers Valve, which would also include the Steam game distribution platform. Quite why Google would purchase Valve is a mystery to me? Maybe Half Life 2: Episode 3 will be free?

More information on Google possible buying Valve can be found here