Record Your Computer Sounds: How to Enable Stereo Mix

If you've ever held your microphone up to your speakers in order to record your computer's sound, then first off, I laugh in your face. Secondly, stop doing it the crude way. It's called stereo mix.

Stereo mix lets you capture the sound exactly as you hear it from your speakers. It's useful if you wanted to capture your computers sound, just as you would capture a screen shot with "print screen". You can use it as an input device in most applications that use voice like skype, AIM, MSN, etc. This captures all sound coming out of your computer such as music and windows sounds. You can use it to play music into a voice program.

This method may not work for everyone though, because not everyone's sound card has the feature. There's no way to tell unless you check. To enable stereo mix, click on sound options in the control panel.

 In the sound window, click on the recording tab and right click in an empty portion of the window and click "show disabled devices". Most of the time, stereo mix comes disabled and by default, any disabled sound devices that are installed in your computer will not show up here.

If you do have any disabled devices, they should show up now as ghosty, faded icons. If you don't see stereo mix among them, then you don't have stereo mix. Too bad. If you do see it, right click and hit enable.

That's it. Now you can select stereo mix as a recording device in your programs. Usually you have to go to a setup screen and choose your input device. Stereo mix should be listed among them.