Total Recorder supports the direct capturing of Internet streams.

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

If you use the ordinary recording you 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 any external playback program. Total Recorder itself connects to an Internet server, receives data from the server in a compressed format (e.g. mp3, wma, etc.) and writes the data to a file in its original (compressed) format.

Thus the main advantages of background recording are the following:

• There is no need to use an external software player.
• Re-encoding is not required to save 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.
  

Here is a list of formats that are supported for being background recorded:

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.