Chrome extension to listen and capture streaming audio

You could try 3 ways, neither one does provide 100% guarantee to meet your needs.

Before going into more detailed descriptions, I must note that Chrome extensions do not provide convenient tools for working on per connection level - sufficiently low level, required for stream capturing. This is by design. This is why the 1-st way is:

1. To look at other browsers, for example Firefox, which provides low-level APIs for connections. They are already known to be used by similar extensions. You may have a look at MediaStealer. If you do not have a specific requirement to build your system on Chrome, you should possibly move to Firefox.

2. You can develop a Chrome extension, which intercepts HTTP-requests by means of webRequest API, analyses their headers and extracts media urls (such as containing audio/mpeg MIME-type, for example, in HTTP-headers). Just for a quick example of code you make look at the following SO question - How to change response header in Chrome. Having the url you may force appropriate media download as a file. It will land in default downloads folder and may have unfriendly name. (I made such an extension, but I do not have requirements for further processing). If you need to further process such files, it can be a challenge to monitor them in the folder, and run additional analysis in a separate program.

3. You may have a look at NPAPI plugins in general, and their streaming APIs in particular. I can imagine that you create a plugin registered for, again, audio/mpeg MIME-type, and receives the data via NPP_NewStream, NPP_WriteReady and NPP_Write methods. The plugin can be wrapped into a Chrome extension. Though I made NPAPI plugins, I never used this API, and I'm not sure it will work as expected. Nethertheless, I'm mentioning this possibility here for completenees. This method requires some coding other than web-coding, meaning C/C++. NB. NPAPI plugins are deprecated and not supported in Chrome since September 2015.

Taking into account that you have some external (to the extension) "fingerprinting service" in mind, which sounds like an intelligent data processing, you may be interested in building all the system out of a browser. For example, you could, possibly, involve a HTTP-proxy, saving media from passing traffic.

If you're writing a Chrome extension, you can use the Chrome tabCapture API to record audio.

chrome.tabCapture.capture({audio: true}, function(stream) {  var recorder = new MediaRecorder(stream);  [...]});

The rest is left as an exercise to the reader; MDN has more documentation on how to use MediaRecorder.

When this question was asked in 2013, neither chrome.tabCapture nor MediaRecorder existed.

Mac OSX solution using soundflower: http://rogueamoeba.com/freebies/soundflower/

After installing soundflower it should appear as a separate audio device in the sound preferences (apple > system preferences > sound). Divert the computer's audio to the 2ch option (stereo, 16ch is surround), then inside a DAW, such as 'audacity', set the audio input as soundflower. Now the sound should be channeled to your DAW ready for recording.

Note: having diverted the audio from the internal speakers to soundflower you will only be able to hear the audio if the 'soundflowerbed' app is actually open. You know it's open if there's a 8 legged blob in the top right task bar. Clicking this icon gives you the sound flower options.