Simple Screen Record - I can't record with internal mic off

[doyleed]

Hi - I LOVE Simple Screen Recorder, but I can not seem to record with the internal mic muted. If I mute the internal mic, I get no sound - say when I try to record a youtube video playing, but if I un mute my internal mic - I get the youtube sound plus any sound my internal laptop mic picks up. My laptop is a Samsung ATIV Book 9 which dual boots Windows and Ubuntu 15.04. I mute or unmute the internal mic via the Sound icon in System settings under the input tab. Muting the mic in alsamixer has the same affect, it make Simple Screen Recorder not record any sound. I want the mic muted but the sound from youtube to be recorded. Well - THANKs for a wonderful program. If you don't have time or interest in thinking about my specific problem, that is fine. -- Ed Doyle

[StripedMonkey]

First off I would suggest getting something like youtube-dl and downloading
the youtube videos and editing them into the clips that you want, its much
more simple to do and you don't get as many issues.

What backend are you using?

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:51 AM, doyleed notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi - I LOVE Simple Screen Recorder, but I can not seem to record with the
internal mic muted. If I mute the internal mic, I get no sound - say when I
try to record a youtube video playing, but if I un mute my internal mic - I
get the youtube sound plus any sound my internal laptop mic picks up. My
laptop is a Samsung ATIV Book 9 which dual boots Windows and Ubuntu 15.04.
I mute or unmute the internal mic via the Sound icon in System settings
under the input tab. Muting the mic in alsamixer has the same affect, it
make Simple Screen Recorder not record any sound. I want the mic muted but
the sound from youtube to be recorded. Well - THANKs for a wonderful
program. If you don't have time or interest in thinking about my specific
problem, that is fine. -- Ed Doyle

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#342.

[doyleed]

Hi - Thank you for responding. - I am sorry - I only mentioned youtube as an example although I do use it for testing. If I really do want a youtube video - I do use youtube-dl and I agree, it too is excellent. Back to my problem - I have tried all combinations of ALSA and PulseAudio. It seems that anything I do to mute the internal mic makes SSR not record any audio at all. But if the mic is un muted, then SSR records both the internal audio which I want and the mic audio which I do not want. This has two negative affects, one the audio takes on a kind of hollow sound because of the mic feedback and two, I pick up other sounds in the room such as my dog barking - etc. Well, again, thanks for taking the time to respond. -- Ed

[StripedMonkey]

PulseAudio has multiple things that you can record from, For me right now I
have Monitor of Built-in Audio Analog Stereo and a few others. Try one of
those. They might work, The same goes with ALSA. Another option is to use
JACK it has Record system mic and record system speakers.

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 11:24 AM, doyleed notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi - Thank you for responding. - I am sorry - I only mentioned youtube as
an example although I do use it for testing. If I really do want a youtube
video - I do use youtube-dl and I agree, it too is excellent. Back to my
problem - I have tried all combinations of ALSA and PulseAudio. It seems
that anything I do to mute the internal mic makes SSR not record any audio
at all. But if the mic is un muted, then SSR records both the internal
audio which I want and the mic audio which I do not want. This has two
negative affects, one the audio takes on a kind of hollow sound because of
the mic feedback and two, I pick up other sounds in the room such as my dog
barking - etc. Well, again, thanks for taking the time to respond. -- Ed

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#342 (comment).

[doyleed]

Hi my friend. Well, I think I just now tried again, every combination of option with AlsaMixer. Anything I do to mic gain or mic mute affects the audio when for test purposes, I play a youtube video and attempt to use SSR to record it. The video is perfect. The audio is ok if there is no ambiant noise, well maybe a little hollow sounding compared to the original depending on mic gain. Perhaps it is something unique to my laptop or audio. I have fooled around with it quite a bit in the past, and I at least thought I knew what I was doing, but nothing seemed to work for me to fix this problem. - Well, again, thanks for your time and thoughts.

I have not tried Jack. I read a bit about it on the web and enough people seemed to be having problems with it that I just decided not to bother with it.

[iamgreaser]

JACK is pretty much the recommended approach for SSR. I'll give you some pointers.

• Use qjackctl, it makes stuff easy to set up.
• You can probably get away with "Realtime" disabled and "No Memory Lock" enabled.
• Use 3 periods/buffer. You may wish to start with 512 frames/period, but that's what you'll be wanting to tweak.
• Pick a good sample rate, either 48000Hz or 44100Hz depending on your sound card.
• There's a way to feed PulseAudio into JACK. It induces a crapton of audio lag in most PA programs (Thanks Lennart!) but it's probably your best bet for actually getting stuff into JACK - for some stupid reason SDL still doesn't have an official driver for JACK. Google Is Your Friend.
• There's a way to feed ALSA into JACK but I've yet to pull it off.

[doyleed]

I just went to the Software Center and installed JACK mixer. Clicking on the icon I only saw one control which said Mon. I didn't touch it, but then found I had no speaker audio when playing a youtube video. I uninstalled JACK and rebooted and now I have audio again, but still can not record if I disable the internal mic in any way. --- Well - since I guess no one else is having this problem, it must be unique to my system, so we can close this or end it or what ever is normal to do. Thanks anyway - Ed

[MaartenBaert]

ALSA has no support for recording your speakers. The only reason why you could record your speakers in the first place was because the microphone was picking up the sound from your speakers. So obviously, if you mute the microphone, then the sound is gone ;).

If you don't want to use JACK, your only option is PulseAudio. Choose the PulseAudio backend in SSR and select 'Monitor of ...' as the source. This should work regardless of what your microphone is doing. But it's not 100% reliable, which is why I recommend JACK instead.