Extract currently playing sound output channel to mp3

Question

It has to be sound source ignorant(youtube, online radio, skype calls, etc). Everything that comes out of "my speakers" must be saved in any decent quality sound format.

How can I do that?

P.S. It is Ubuntu system.

Answer 1

not sure about Ubuntu, on Windows you should choose in the recording audio settings the input mixing channel instead of microhpne.

It should be the same approach, hope that helps

Answer 2

I came across a pretty simple solution:

wget http://outflux.net/software/pa-clone
chmod u+x pa-clone
./pa-clone output.wav

Which looks like

#!/bin/bash
# Copyright 2008-2009, Kees Cook <kees@outflux.net>
#
# Records the PulseAudio monitor channel.
# http://www.outflux.net/blog/archives/2009/04/19/recording-from-pulseaudio/
#
WAV="$1"
if [ -z "$WAV" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 OUTPUT.WAV" >&2
    exit 1
fi
rm -f "$WAV"

# Get sink monitor:
MONITOR=$(pactl list | grep -A2 '^Source #' | \
    grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | awk '{print $NF}' | tail -n1)

# Record it raw, and convert to a wav
echo "Recording to $WAV ..."
echo "Ctrl-C or Close this window to stop"
parec -d "$MONITOR" | sox -t raw -r 44100 -sLb 16 -c 2 - "$WAV"

inside.