Sampling Your Sound Card on Mac

Scribbled by Lethal Illness @ 11:48 PM on May 7th, 2010.

Due to Audacity taking out the key feature we need on it’s Mac version I had to write two separate guides to this tutorial. This guide is for all Mac users wishing to sample audio from their sound card. If you want to sample audio from your PC sound card check out this post.

I have thought long and hard *wink wink* about how to do this article because there are many options to sample your sound card on Mac, but as far as I could find there is only one free option. Because of this only free option there is an extra few steps included in this tutorials that its PC counterpart doesn’t. However, it is by no means hard nor does it really take that long to do. Finally, there are paid options that will do this all in one program, but rather then making a tutorial that will inspire people to pirate I will show a free option out there.

Prerequisites:

Apple computer w/ Mac OS X.
A desired audio source to be recorded.
Knowledge to download a program.

How to Sample Audio off your Sound Card

Downloading & Installing Audacity

Audacity is a free, open source audio editor. It is by no means a full featured DAW nor should be used as one but being easy to use and free makes it a great program to use for recording our sound cards. To get Audacity, you will simply need to download Audacity 1.3 (series, beta) for Mac OS X. After you download the .dmg from Google Code (the link I just posted), we will install Audacity.

Audacity is a bit different to install then a typical Mac program, but still easy. Simply make a new folder on your desktop and name it “Audacity 3.1″. Next you are going to double click the .dmg file you’ve just installed. You should now see a Audacity icon along with a bunch of folders and two text files. We’re going to drag all those files into the folder you just created. Finally, we’re going to drag that folder with all the contents into your Applications folder, if it asks you to authenticate just type in your password and you’re fine.

Downloading & Installing LAME MP3 Encoder

I guess you can call this optional because this will only be necessary if you want to save audio as an MP3 in Audacity. If you don’t require an MP3 export then be my guest to skip right over this step. However it really isn’t much of a problem. You need to download the “Lame_Library_v3.98.2_for_Audacity_on_OSX.dmg” from here (fourth link down).

Next to install the LAME MP3 encoder you need to follow these steps straight from the “Lame Installation” wiki;

1. When you have finished downloading, double-click the .dmg to mount it, then go to the Finder (in Safari, “Lame Library v3.98.2 for Audacity.pkg” will be extracted automatically after downloading).

2. Double-click “Lame Library v3.98.2 for Audacity.pkg”. This will install the LAME binary “libmp3lame.dylib” in /usr/local/lib/audacity

3. If Audacity asks where the MP3 encoding library is when you export as MP3:

1. Click Audacity > Preferences then the File Formats tab Note: in Audacity 1.2, it may be necessary to click the left-pointing arrow top right of the window to reveal the tab. In Audacity 1.3.4 this tab is called Audio Files; in 1.3.5 – 1.3.7 Import / Export; in 1.3.8 or later Libraries.

2. Look for the MP3 Export section

3. Click the “Find Library” button

4. In Audacity 1.2, this will ask if you want to locate the LAME encoder; click “Yes” (in Audacity 1.3, click “Browse”)

5. In the dialogue box, navigate to /usr/local/lib/audacity, and select “libmp3lame.dylib”

6. Click Open, then OK

Downloading & Installing Soundflower

Soundflower is a free program that will allow you to route audio from the computer’s output into and recording program because it makes the computer see it as another sound device, simply genius I think. To get Soundflower you will need to visit their developer’s website and download their program. The installation is pretty straight forward, just open the .dmg and double click the .pkg inside. A dialog will pop up and you just keep hitting next until it’s done.

Setting Soundflower as Default Sound Output

Okay this is where it might get a little tricky for the average computer user. First we need to open up OS X’s “Audio Midi Setup”, to do that you can simply type “audio midi setup” into spotlight. Now you will have a dialog that looks similar to mine (the dialog on the left);

Left, Default Audio Midi Setup - Right, Audio Midi Setup for Soundflower

Okay as you can see from my screen shot above, I have a little speaker icon next to the choice that says “Built-in Output”. This indicates that my Macbook Pro’s internal speakers are the default output for sound to come out of. You will need to change this option to “Soundflower (2ch)” so you can direct the sound to Soundflower and then later route it into Audacity. To do this you are going to simply right click “Soundflower (2ch)” and choose “Use this device for sound output”. Now the little speaker icon should be next to the “Soundflower (2ch)” text [like the dialog on the right].

Remember: You will need to go back to “Audio Midi Setup” when you are done sampling your sound card and make your default sound output back to whatever it was (in my case it was “Built-in Output”) or you will not hear sound.

Setting Audacity to Record from Soundflower

Now if you were to play a song or anything at this point you will not hear any sound. This is because as I said before we set the output to come out of the “Soundflower (ch2)”. Obviously by default Audacity’s input is not set to the “Soundflower (ch2)” so we will have to do that if we want to record any audio into it. To do this we will need to navigate to “Audacity” on the menu bar then click “Preferences”. A dialog will pop up and the default tab should be the first one which says “Devices”. All you have to do is under the “Recording” section click the drop down box next to “Device” and choose “Soundflower (ch2)”. After you do that click “OK” on the bottom right and were almost done! At the top, in the middle, you should see a speaker icon with a slider to the right and to the right of that a microphone icon with a slider. We want to make sure both those sliders are set all the way to the right (Output Volume: 1.0).

Audacity Setting Soundflower as Recording Device

Sampling Audio off your Sound Card

Finally we are ready! Lets hit the record button on Audacity then go to your audio source (in my case I choose a direct upload on CrazyPellas) and hit play on your audio source. At this point you will notice the blue waveforms being recording into Audacity. This is a good sign and means you did everything right, if not back track through the tutorial and make sure you did everything as directed.

Playing DJ Shawne's Track on CrazyPellas, Recording on Audacity

After your audio source finishes you’re going to want to hit stop on Audacity and save. To save you have to go to the menu bar and click “Flie” then “Export”. Now you will see a dialog, after you type a name for it your going to hit that drop down box next to “Format”. What you choose depends on what you will be using the audio for. For better quality AIFF or WAV is what you would want. For your iPod pleasures MP3 will do.

Exporting Audio in MP3 Format

That’s all there is too it. If anyone has any trouble hit me up in the comments.