Record online radio & music on PC for free

Have some radio program want to record to your PC? If you like to save some radio program, streaming music or audio from internet, you can download a sound recorder which is capable of recording internal sound from your computer. Most audio recorders can only capture sound through microphone input other than internal audio from the computer itself. Audacity is a free, open source, cross-platform audio recorder and editor. It provides us a simple way to record audio, music, radio, podcasts from the internet. In this article, we will show you how to record online radio and music from internet on Windows PC using the free internet audio recorder, Audacity.

Run Audacity on your PC, Select Windows WASAPI as the Audio Host, choose the speaker with (loopback) in its name as the Recording Device, it’s something like “Speakers (….) (loopback)”. Audacity is now ready to capture internal sound from your PC other than its microphone.

record system audio, streaming music, internet radio using Audacity for Windows

Go to play the online music, listen to your favorite radio station and broadcasts on your computer. Click the red Record button in Audacity to start recording, click the yellow Stop button to stop. You can hit the Pause to pause anytime in the recording process, and then hit the same button again to resume. Play the recorded audio in the recorder program to make sure the audio, music, podcast has been properly recorded. Optionally edit the recording file in Audacity editor, like trimming, applying special effects, before saving it to your PC. Also you have the option to save the recording file in different file format of your liking, WAV, AIFF, OGG, etc. If you need to record internet radio as MP3, you need to download extra library for Audacity. See this guide to convert audios to MP3 in Audacity.  

Video and internal sound recording alternatives

If you need to record online movies, videos along with system audio, the above audio recorder can’t help. You should follow these steps to record streaming audio & music on PC using another premium screen video recorder and sound capture.

Record Mac system audio using Audacity

Unlike its Windows version, Audacity for Mac can’t help you grab sound from the computer itself without the help from third-party tools. Fortunately we can find some virtual sound devices that can route the system audio so we can still use Audacity to record internal audio on Mac for free.