So it's just a shim between the program and the audio driver that splits the signal off to a file and passes it along to the real driver? Slick.

Yup. When I saw it, I had one of those smack-my-forehead, "why didn't I think of that" moments. Very VERY slick.

Of course, this assumes that the program you'd be using to play your DVD does a good job of decoding the audio.

If you think about it, the likelihood of a commercial DVD player app doing a good decoding job is greater than the likelihood of a hacker-written DECSS-type app doing a good decoding job. Right?

Something else neat about TotalRecoder: If the program you're grabbing audio from is doing spotty playback (for example, it's a streaming audio program and your download speed sucks), then TotalRecorder, by its very design, creates an end-result file without the spotty-ness. Because it just intercepts packets and streams them to the hard disk, even if the packets are coming in intermittently, they get put onto the hard disk correctly assembled so it all sounds right.

This was actually very useful in the situation where I used it. I was ripping the audio track of an entire DVD from beginning to end. But the casing of my computer did not properly cool the DVD drive, so it couldn't get through an entire movie without it heating up and having the playback start to stutter. (I have since fixed this problem by the way, but I digress.)

I was able to rip the entire audio track and have it come out perfect, without any stutters or skips, despite the fact that the playback did stutter during the recording procedure. As you said, SLICK.