T61 RIAA SoundMax

So today I spent a good 4 hours of time trying to record what my speakers play on my Lenovo T61.Looks like recording right off the sound mixer was kind of a standard feature in sound cards even as back as in 2002.On windows XP if you go to Volume Control Applet -> Options ->Properties and then select the Recording radio button and if your sound card/driver support the record what you listen feature, you will see more than just the microphone in the white box below the radio button

Unfortunately looks like on T61 ,Lenovo deliberately prevents "record what you hear" feature from the sound card at a hardware level.So even if you upgrade to the latest version of SoundMax driver it won't help

Here are a few forum posts I found

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/General-Discussion/Why-has-stereo-Mix-been-disabled-on-thinkpads-amp-when-do-we-get/m-p/38690

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=52527

People think it is probably Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA) to blame.

But if you really want to overcome the hardware restriction you can go for a combination of audacity and Virtual Audio Cable. Worked pretty slick for me, audacity is open source and free whereas VAC is 30 $ per License.They have a trial version too but it keeps saying the word "Trial" every 30 seconds in your audio output.