Back in the day I’d digitize stuff by taking audio off my receiver and run it into the audio-in on my computer. I was lazy the other day and decided I wanted to try to pull sound directly off the sound card. And that’s how I found Audio-Recorder [1]. It’s easy enough to install and I was able to pull sound directly off the sound card. Nice.

Then I started playing with the Source configuration. It detected all of the expected /dev foo coming off my audio card. Then I noticed it also detected RhythmBox and Spotify as audio sources. I accidentally left it configured to Spotify and wandered off.

This evening I was listening to They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln [2] album on Spotify on my phone. I was rocking out to Mr. Me when I got home so transferred my Spotify session to my workstation downstairs. Bigger and better speakers, the better to share with Elizabeth. That was well and good.

After dinner and then some time sitting out in the rain with my lurvly bride I went down to the Man Cave and started puttering around–listening to the rest of Lincoln on Spotify. I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye that the system tray icon for audio-recorder was glowing. So I opened the app, and lo, it is dutifully recording songs off Spotify as I play them. And stuffing the resulting files full of metadata. And organizing them by track name inside folders for each artist. Didn’t even ask it to do this for me.

Brain asplode! I can own the entire Spotify catalog by doing nothing more than queuing songs up and playing them 24/7. At least until I run out of disk. And now I’m one happy Fezster.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~osmoma/+archive/ubuntu/audio-recorder
[2] http://tmbw.net/wiki/Lincoln