Recording audio playback in Windows with PulseAudio?

Question

I would like to record the playback audio of my computer using software such as Audacity. Unfortunately, my audio card software does not come with a stereo mix input, and after reading these two tutorials for Audacity, Tutorial 1 and Tutorial 2, I learned that I could probably create a virtual one.

I have been told that I could use the Freeware sound server PulseAudio for this (as opposed to something like Virtual Audio Cable, which is proprietary and shareware).

Unfortunately, it looks like PulseAudio was designed mostly for Unix systems, but I found that part of the software has been also ported to Windows. So I downloaded the Windows binaries and now have the following files in my machine:

• channelmap-test.exe
• flist-test.exe
• get-binary-name-test.exe
• hook-list-test.exe
• interpol-test.exe
• ipacl-test.exe
• mainloop-test.exe
• mcalign-test.exe
• memblockq-test.exe
• memblock-test.exe
• pacat.exe
• pacat-simple.exe
• pactl.exe
• paplay.exe
• parec-simple.exe
• pulseaudio.exe
• sync-playback.exe

Is it possible to use these binaries to set up a virtual stereo mix channel? How would I proceed from this point?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This might be a less direct way to do it, but I've used Audacity to record and had the same issue with my audio card. What I did instead of downloading this was, I exported the audio file as a .WAV and then opened it in Windows Media Player (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/windows-media-player). From there, I would change it to an .MP3 file and change the settings to get it sounding as close to a stereo mix as possible. The reality is that when you're recording, the sound will be stereo unless you pan the audio to either the left or right channel while you're mixing it down.