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Dell Colludes With RIAA, Disables Stereo Mix
RCTrucker7 writes with a link to a Maximum PC story, which begins: "Details of Dell's surreptitious collusion with RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) have emerged. Apparently, the computer manufacturer disabled the Stereo Mix/Mono Mix/Wave Out sound recording function on certain notebooks to assuage RIAA. The hardware functionality is being disabled without any prior notice and one blogger has even alleged that he was asked by Dell's customer support staff to [shell] out $99 if he desired the stereo mix option. Gateway and Pac Bell are the other two manufacturers to have bowed to RIAA at the expense of their customers' satisfaction and disabled stereo mix without warning." (There are some workarounds posted in the comments of the linked article.)
How often is stereo mix actually used? People are overreacting; they think recording is disabled. That's ridiculous: tons of people use microphones, for gaming, voice chat, they couldn't afford to turn recording off. What is disabled is some boolean in the driver, not in the hardware that allows stereo mix to work.
How many people even use stereo mix? You record what's playing through your speakers. Any decent sound editing program is going to have some kind of mixer that will combine your recording with whatever you were playing along with.
The only use I see is for a program like FRAPS, which records your screen and sound.