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Software lets you "hijack" the sounds on your computer

By CRAIG CROSSMAN
Knight Ridder Newspapers

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We like to think that we are in control of our own computers, but we really aren't. We see things on our screen, but we can't save or print them. And there are sounds our computers make that we can't save so that we can play them back at another time or burn them to a CD.

But fortunately for us, there are some products out there that give us back at least some of that control.

Many of us are familiar with screen-capture utilities that let us take "snapshots" of the entire or any portion of the screen and either save them to disk or send the image to a printer. What you may not be so familiar with are two software utilities that let you do the same basic thing with sound.

Anyone who uses computers to play live audio streams using Real One, Windows Media Player and other similar products knows there is no easy way to capture the live audio stream and save it to disk.

In fact, there are many applications that generate some kind of sound with no facility to capture the audio. Up until recently, the only way to capture the audio was to literally plug in some kind of audio recording device into the speaker outputs.

So let me tell you about two capture programs, one for the Macintosh, the other for Windows. Both do basically the same thing. They let you capture any audio your computer generates and save it to disk. As with most any application, each has its own feature set to enhance the basic ability.

So as not to be redundant, I'll describe the basic feature set of the program known as Audio Hijack. Check out each of the products' Web sites for more details.

Audio Hijack ($16) is designed to run on the Macintosh OS X operating system. After installation, Audio Hijack will first ask you for the name of the application whose audio you want to "hijack."

According to the software's developer, Rogue Amoeba Software (www.rogueamoeba.com), the program intercepts the named application's output path and literally hijacks the signal. Once intercepted, it redirects the audio into Audio Hijack's recording facility. You can turn on the recorder at any time, allowing you to capture only the audio you want and then save it to disk in a standard AIFF format.
 
The captured file then can be burned to a CD or played in any software audio player like iTunes or any hardware audio player like an iPod. It's ideal if you have a favorite game sound you want to play again, or you want to capture the audio from your favorite DVD movie or music player.

Audio Hijack also comes with a built-in timer so you can begin and end any audio capture at any specific time you want. This makes it ideal for unattended recording.

Audio Hijack Pro ($30) adds such features as the ability to directly record and encode the audio in the popular MP3 format. The Pro version comes with industry-standard VST and AudioUnit audio effects, as well as 15 custom DSPs written specifically for Audio Hijack Pro that you can apply to enhance the audio quality. Plus you can hijack the audio of applications that are already running.

The standard version forces you to quit the application before capture is possible. The Pro version also lets you pause a recording and then resume, and seamlessly split a recorded audio file into multiple files in case your storage device can't handle the one large file.

If you're looking for a similar product on the Windows platform, check out High Criteria's Total Recorder (www.highcriteria.com). Like the Mac version, Total Recorder comes in a Standard ($11.95) and Professional ($35.95) Edition.

It should be noted that many software audio products purposely do not let their users record their output because the audio is copyrighted. You should obey all copyright laws and use these programs only for legal purposes.

Xerox XL592Db 19-inch monitor

Xerox www.xerox-displays.com

$800

I am always searching for a good flat-panel monitor, thanks to the many requests I get from family and friends who want to get rid of their cathode-ray tube monitors, which can take up more than a foot of space behind the screen with the innards.

Xerox has entered the monitor market with its flat panels, and the 19-inch monitor, XL592Db ($800), that I've been testing really does a solid job of conveying a nice, sharp, colorful picture. The flat screen's maximum resolution is 1,280-by-1,024 pixels, which worked fine at 19 inches.

Xerox launched 13 different monitors at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. I took a look at the 5 Series, although there are less expensive 3 Series monitors (a 19-inch for $400) and more expensive and more elegant 7 Series monitors (a 19-inch for $850).

I liked having analog and digital inputs on this monitor, and Xerox was good enough to make sure that all the necessary cables were packed in the box. I was especially pleased with the on-screen display-functions buttons here, which easily brought up ways to control brightness, contrast, horizontal and vertical positioning, and other utilities that help a monitor to provide the best picture around.

The speakers on the XL592Db provided good, solid sound with some volume as well.

Despite my feeling that this was a superb monitor, I feel compelled to offer my caveat about all LCD (liquid crystal display) monitors: While the flat panels will save you space, their images are not quite as crisp as better cathode-ray tube monitors.

— Kevin Washington, The Baltimore Sun