At least a few times every week, I encounter music that I really, really love embedded into YouTube videos or streaming media from other sources. As a music fanatic who never leaves home without his shiny iPod Classic, I have a serious need to take these gems and carry them around with me, file them safely away in my carefully organized collection of mp3s on a secondary hard drive, and sing way too loudly along with them in the car.
Unfortunately, YouTube and streaming media aren’t inherently downloadable. They’re ostensibly forced to exist forever within the applets that run them, trapped inside of their web-cages. Of course, there are little software add-ons like SoThink and FlashGet for Firefox and other browsers that will let you snag a lot of streaming media files for yourself and house them indefinitely on your computer if you’re afraid that they’ll somehow vanish. The fact still remains – media that’s been compressed for smooth web use isn’t at the top of its game. At best, any video that you swipe from the online universe is a small, pixelated shadow of what it would be on an official release. These things fall under the ‘good enough’ category, and the legal territory that delineates what you can look at but not touch is still murky.
While I collect a lot of music, I’m typically not obsessive about gathering up live performances of any artist – except for Brooklyn’s Elysian Fields. So, when I found a 90 minute streaming concert video that was filmed on a smoky French stage this past June, I knew I had to find a way to have it. I found their lost Clinical Trial tapes after years of searching, I found 2005’s Black Session, I joined eMusic to get a four song set that they played there, and I needed this.
While web video isn’t great, audio – while still imperfect – suffers a lot less when it’s compressed for slick internet usage. It’s pretty fair game, and since I don’t anticipate any live Elysian Fields releases, it’s ‘good enough’. This is where Audio Hijack comes in.
I talked about Audio Hijack once before. It’s a beautiful little piece of software that will allow you to record audio from any source that your computer can hear – streaming radio shows, your browser, your webcam, and any other sounds your computer makes. You can capture them all. Traditionally, I’ve only used Audio Hijack to capture audio from my record player to preserve the old discs in a more durable digital format, but the opportunity to record a ‘live’ show form the browser also exists.
It’s amazingly simple – just open Audio Hijack, direct the source to the browser of your choice, and hit ‘hijack’ and ‘record’.
Given the fact that web video sometimes has a tendency to buffer and rebuffer itself as it plays (which would make your audio recording useless), there are a few simple steps which I took in order to make everything as simple as possible.
First, close up anything else that will suck up your bandwidth. The only thing that your computer should be talking to the internet about is your streaming video.
Second, if you’re recording from a browser, don’t leave any other browser windows open. You’d hate to have your relatively clean 90-minute concert recording broken up by the little click of Facebook IMs popping up.
Ultimately, the 90 minute show was recorded perfectly and clocked in at under 70 MB. You can adjust your recording clarity to a wide variety of levels for all manner of output later, but ‘Internet (High)’ always works fine for me. I’m not an audiophile, though – any clicks and pops I run into I usually just accept as an integral part of the recorded musical experience. The quest for real-life clarity is best left for concerts that you actually attend. Note that recording is also in real time, much like making a mixtape on a dual cassette recorder. You can’t speed up or skip ahead. It’s a little romantic that way.
None of this is to say that you shouldn’t support your favorite artists by actually purchasing their work. I download plenty of stuff, but my collection of CDs (even if I never use them) matches much of what I’ve downloaded. As a creator myself, I understand the value of having your work both appreciated and compensated for. As with all things, act responsibly.
The fact that I’ve been recording old 1980s toy commercials from ancient VHS tapes for YouTube is another story entirely. Someone’s gotta keep these things safe.
