Use Freecorder to record radio on the internet

Go to www.freecorder.com. Freecoder is a free toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. It works by recording the sound that’s being played through your computer’s soundcard. Click on the Get It Free button to start downloading. If the yellow security bar appears in your browser click on it and choose Download File. Click on Open or Run to begin the installation process. To avoid any changes being made to your browser be sure to clear the checkboxes labelled ‘Make Ask my default browser search provider’ and ‘Set my home page to Ask.com’.

At the end of the installation process you will notice that the new toolbar has been added to your browser. Go along to a website that has some audio you’d like to record. As an example, we will visit www.bbc.co.uk/radio2. Click on Listen Live and wait until you can hear the radio programme playing. To start recording, go to the Freecorder toolbar and click on Record Audio. If a security warning pops up then click on Allow.

A small window will pop up on screen showing the audio being recorded. In the bottom left corner of this window you’ll see a counter showing how much disk space is being used for the recording. It roughly works out at about 1MB of storage space for every minute that’s recorded, which isn’t a whole lot these days. When you’ve finished move the mouse off the recording window and a Stop Recording button will appear ­ click it. A brief summary will show how much has been recorded and the disk space it’s used. Click on Close.

To listen to the recorded audio, click Play on the toolbar. This displays the folder where all the audio files captured by Freecorder are stored. They are labelled with the date and time of the recording. To change the name of a file to make it easier to recognise, right-click on it and choose Rename. To play an audio file, double-click it.

As well as audio, Freecorder can capture streamed video that’s played in the web browser. Start playing a video online then, on the Freecorder toolbar, click on Save Video. In the window that appears you’ll be able to see details of the video as it’s downloading to your computer. Once the download has finished click on the Save Media button and the video will be saved to the same folder that stores recorded audio. Repeat Step 4 to playback video files.

Click on Settings on the Freecorder toolbar to make changes to the program. In Storage Directory you can change the hard disk folder where audio and video files are stored. As well, you can increase the amount of storage space available to Freecorder: under the Video Capture Settings heading increase the ‘Temporary storage size’ limit from 500MB. If you want, under Audio Capture Settings, reduce the bit rate figure to save on storage space ­ but be warned that this will affect the quality of the audio.