Posted By Paul Kafasis on April 4th, 2011

Update (June 20th, 2011): With the release of Audio Hijack Pro 2.9.12, the information below is made obsolete. Get the latest Audio Hijack Pro, then just hijack right from your browsers!

If you’ve used Audio Hijack Pro, you probably know it’s great for recording any audio. One of its most popular uses is to record audio from a web browser. If you want to record audio from sites like Pandora.com or Last.fm for offline listening, Audio Hijack Pro can help. Normally, this is as simple as setting the web browser as your audio source, then pressing Record.

In the past two years or so, however, recording from web browsers has become a bit more difficult. With Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), Safari began using a background process for its audio plugins when in 64-bit mode¹. Audio Hijack Pro works around this by relaunching Safari as 32-bit when required. This suffices, but the hassle has led many users to use different browsers, such as Firefox or Chrome, for their audio capturing.

More recently, Firefox 4 and Google Chrome also changed the way they play audio. They now use background processes for their plugins, just like Safari. Worse, they do it in 32-bit mode too, which means that this can’t be worked around in the same way as Safari. The net result here is that simply selecting Firefox or Chrome won’t grab any audio in Audio Hijack Pro.

Fear not, however! Audio Hijack Pro can capture this audio – it just takes a bit more setup. We’ve got instructions in our Knowledge Base. Check those out, and you should once again be able to grab your web-based audio.

In the meantime, we’re working on improving this. In a future update, we hope to once again make it possible to simply select your source. So, follow the instructions for now, and keep your eye out for updates.

Footnotes:

1. The AHKit1 framework upon which Audio Hijack Pro is built can’t capture background processes. You may notice our audio transmitting app Airfoil can grab this audio. That’s because it uses our newer and more robust AHKit2 framework. Future versions of Audio Hijack Pro will use this as well, but those are still in development. ↩