Software for recording from windows system mixer

[Davie]

I'm afraid this is one of those questions where I'm not even sure if I know the right terminology, so here goes...

I want to record from a streaming audio file to a wav or (preferably) mp3 file. I've been able to grab snippets using the Windows XP Sound Recorder, but that's limited to 60 seconds and gives you every little control over recording parameters. If I understand correctly, all this program does is takes whatever is playing on the sound card (analog) and encodes it to a wav file. This should be fine for my purposes since sound quality isn't that important (the source stream isn't very high quality anyway).

It looks like I can get this feature if I'm willing to pay $20 to upgrade Real Player (line/mic in feature) but it seems there should be a less expensive/better options.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Mr.Radar]

The soundcard does the analog -> digital conversion, the recording program just takes the data and writes it to the disk. A great free program for recording is Audacity, though IME it's very fussy and tends to drop samples if you do anything with your computer while it's recording, however that was with a beta version from around October last year.