Once you’re ready, hit the red circle at the top of your screen and Audacity will record the audio that comes out of the speakers.

It’s also worth checking that the relevant speakers are set as your output device

You’ll want to make sure that the Recording Channel is set to 2 (Stereo), otherwise you’re likely to get an error message.

Choose ‘Windows WASAPI’ from the furthest on the left and then something containing ‘loopback’ from the next one to the right – in this example it’s ‘Speakers (Realtek(R) Audio) (loopback)’

You’ll now need to customise the drop-down boxes above the timeline.

Once installed, open the app and you’ll be presented with a screen like below.

The macOS and Linux versions also offer the same functionality for this tutorial One such program for recording audio is Audacity, but you can also use this free software to skip the first stage if you don’t have access to Stereo Mix. Just make sure you select ‘Stereo Mix’ under the input device, instead of the usual ‘Microphone’ or ‘Line in’ options. Once that’s done, you’ll be free to open the audio recording program of your choice to record external sound to.

To make sure this works, we’d also recommend clicking Stereo Mix to highlight it and then ‘Set Default’ at the bottom of the page (you can always change this back after).

In the window that appears, click the ‘Recording’ tab and you should see Stereo Mix marked as disabled.

Choose ‘Hardware and Sound’ and then ‘Sound’.

In the search bar next to the Start Menu, type ‘control’ and click the relevant result.

To record external audio, you’ll need to turn it on:

Stereo Mix is a feature built into Microsoft’s operating system, but it’s disabled by default.

Record computer audio audacity