Record any sound your computer makes

November 28, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Your computer is a marvelous piece of technology. It can display just about anything you can imagine. Photographic images can display pictures found in newspapers, magazines and publications you may not even know exist.

Full-motion video can play DVD movies, television shows, news programming. If it’s out there, your computer can more than likely display it. Then there are the sounds.

Just the other day, I was looking for an audio sample of a baying wolf. No problem. In fact, I found that I could choose from several selections including the gender and age of the wolf.

But there was one small problem after I found what I was looking for. I couldn’t save the sound I found to my disc.

Too often and for many reasons, you will find that you can play sounds on your computer but you have no way to save them once you find them.

Granted there may be sound, legal reasons why you can’t save or manipulate the audio such as being copyrighted.

But too often, the reason you can’t save the file is simply because whatever source you’ve accessed simply doesn’t offer a Save mechanism.

But Ambrosia Software has a utility that will let you capture any sound your computer can make and save it to disc.

Basically, the idea behind WireTap Studio is a simple one. If it comes out of your computer’s speakers, you can capture and save it to disc. But WireTap Studio actually goes way beyond just capturing audio.

Ambrosia Software says this is a first. Their WireTap Studio lets you actually preview the audio you are about to capture and lets you hear exactly what it will sound like when using different audio formats and sampling rates on the fly.

This ability is called LivePreview. When you begin to play whatever audio on the computer and you click the LivePreview button, the audio goes back about one second so that you are actually hearing the sound moving through the WireTap Studio program instead of the actual source that’s generating the sound.

Now when you select the different format and compression options such as mp3 sampled at 128kbps, you instantly hear how the audio sounds with that codec applied.

Move the sampling rate down to 64kbps and you’ll hear the degradation as you begin to lose some of the higher frequencies.

Select 8kbps and hear compression at its worst.

But if the audio is of just someone talking as opposed to music, then you may be surprised how little difference there is between the sampling rates.

And selecting the lower rate will make those audio files so much smaller, saving you storage space and making their transfer to another location that much faster.

This feature alone makes WireTap Studio a necessary addition to your audio toolbox.

WireTap Studio lets you record from any software and any in-line hardware audio source.

And after you capture the audio, WireTap Studio’s built-in editor lets you refine your audio capture by letting you select any segment.

You can apply some of the included filters that can enhance the sounds with filters and audio effects.

The other really nifty feature is WireTap Studio’s ability to capture two audio sources at the same time. You can then choose to combine them or edit each one by itself.

Other features include lossless audio editing so that you can crop, silence, even delete the audio and then come back later and undo all your changes.

If you record with a bit rate that was too low and you decide you want to improve its sound, you won’t have to re-record the audio or deal with re-compression.

WireTap Studio is only available for the Macintosh. For all of WireTap Studio’s abilities, you can check out a free demo at the Ambrosia website.

If you decide to keep it, it will only cost you $69. Now that’s the sweetest sound of all.

For more information, go to www.ambrosiasw.com.

Craig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. He also hosts the No. 1 daily national computer radio talk show, “Computer America,” heard on Business TalkRadio — Monday through Friday, 10 p.m.-midnight. For more information, visit his website at www.computeramerica.com.

2010, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services