Total Recorder supports the direct capturing of Internet streams.

With Total Recorder you can record an Internet transmission either through an ordinary recording or by capturing (referred to as background recording).

If you use the ordinary recording, you will need some playback program (e.g. WinAmp, WMP, etc. or a browser) to connect to an Internet server. This playback program receives data from the server in a compressed format (e.g. mp3, wma, etc.), decodes it to an uncompressed (PCM) format and passes the uncompressed data to the soundboard.

For the direct background recording of an Internet stream, you do not need an external playback program. Total Recorder connects to an Internet server, receives data from the server in a compressed format (e.g. mp3, wma, etc.) and then writes the data to a file in its original (compressed) format.

The main advantages of background recording are the following:

• There is no need to use an external software player.
• Re-encoding is not required when saving a stream to a file.
• A decreased load on your system.
• If you do not listen to the Internet stream being recorded then your soundboard is not used at all.
• Total Recorder can extract data from Internet streams and insert track separators based on that data.
• The process of scheduling a background recording of an Internet stream is much easier than that of scheduling an ordinary recording.
• You can record two and more transmissions at the same time without having them mixed.
  

A list of formats which are supported for background recording follows:

audio:	MP3, WMA, and Ogg Vorbis
video:	Windows Media Video (WMV) FLV streams this allows you, for example, to background record video from YouTube)

Please note that this feature is available only in the Professional (for audio), VideoPro and Developer Editions (for audio and video) of Total Recorder.