2015-05-01 05:15:30

Hi all,
So, I realize this is probably a very stupid question. So I apologize in advance.
Say I want to record content from both my microphone and sound card in real time. I don't have a mixer, and don't particularly want to buy one. What's the best way to do this?
I realize that I can record the tracks separately, but that just seems utterly unnecessary. I ask this because I want to record a walkthrough for Psycho Strike. And although I could easily get something like virtual audio cable, everything I've heard about it is overwhelming me. I don't really understand it, which probably means that I have no business recording something like this in the first place, but I do want to give it a try.
Should I just use two separate programs, for example, record the game from my sound card using Gold Wave, while simultaneously recording my voice with, I don't know, Windows sound recorder, then mix the two tracks in Gold Wave? It seems to me there would be latency issues when doing this, so I really don't know how well it would work.
Any suggestions are welcome.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2015-05-01 05:34:34

I was wondering that too, ever since my internal mik and speakers got busted.

be a hero and stop Coppa now!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dkm … DkWZ8/edit
-id software, 1995

2015-05-01 07:31:44

Hi,
There are various programs you can use. SoundTap is probably the easiest one; it records in various formats and records both your computer audio and mic pretty well. You can use the demo for two weeks, in which, if I recall correctly, you can do everything you can do in the full version.
Then, there is a free program called "open broadcaster software". It actually records in video formats, and is meant to record video along with the audio. Yet it does capture audio from your soundcard and mic. I've been using this recently to record some of my own walk-throughs, which I uploaded to youtube. However, if you simply want the audio, I'm sure you can find a program that can convert from mp4 to mp3.
Hope this helps.

Brendan
-----
There is one rule above all others for being a man.  Whatever comes, face it on your feet.
@bcs993 on twitter, feel free to follow!

2015-05-01 08:05:32

Hey,
Thanks for these suggestions.
Are these programs reasonably accessible with Jaws? I don't mind doing a bit of Jaws cursoring, if necessary, but if I have to deal with a lot of unlabeled graphics and such, I would like to be forewarned.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2015-05-01 13:35:38

Hi.

-If I were still using Windows full time instead of soundflower on OS X, I would suggest this. First of all, make sure you are wearing headphones so that the audio doesn't double and echo. You need to go under your microphone settings in control panel if using Vista or later and select the checkbox to listen to your microphone. This will mean that you will have to listen to yourself, but it's the easiest way I've found. Now, go to your recording program like audacity and choose the device that sends audio through your soundcard like stereo mix. When you record, you should now get both your system audio and your voice coming through the microphone. This is probably the easiest way to do this without installing any software. Just keep in mind that you will have to put up with hearing yourself in real time as your microphone audio is fed through your soundcard.

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2015-05-01 13:46:07

Hi.
When I last checked, soundtap was perfectly accessible. With OBS there's one small thing you would need to adjust (if I remember correctly, it is the screen capture thing) for which you might need the JAWS curser, but aside from that it is accessible as well.
As for the audacity suggestion, it might work, though I'm not sure if your recording will come out in stereo or not, plus hearing your own voice might become distracting.

Brendan
-----
There is one rule above all others for being a man.  Whatever comes, face it on your feet.
@bcs993 on twitter, feel free to follow!

2015-05-01 15:24:16

here is the only problem with audacity and doing it that way. The person was right by saying that you might be distracted by hereing yourself. Second of all, it isn't real time monotering, so you will have a dilay.

2015-05-01 15:56:40

Hmmm, I thought it would be in realtime, or nearly. There may  be a half second delay. I'm not sure if this would matter when recording since I do this all the time when usng soundflower and line in on my mac to record audio from Vmware Fusion. I would recommend that you investigate all these options that have been discussed here and decide for yourself which works the best for you. I don't know how virtual audio cable works, but from what I've heard, it's the WIndows equivalent of soundflower. Feel free to elaborate if I'm wrong or if you just want to. I'm justthorwing out my ideas.

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2015-05-01 16:41:30

I can't speak for this soundflower program, but I think people slightly exaggerate VAC's complexity; especially for doing something like recording through both your mic and sound card, which is probably one of the easier things to do. Having said that, I would still recommend you try out any of the other alternatives before using VAC.

Brendan
-----
There is one rule above all others for being a man.  Whatever comes, face it on your feet.
@bcs993 on twitter, feel free to follow!

2015-05-01 17:18:53 (edited by Chris 2015-05-01 17:20:24)

Basically, Soundflower just takes audio from one audio source and allows it to be sent to another application. For instance, to send system audio or the audio from a media player, you choose the soundflower channel as the output device for the audio to go out through and then in the receiving application, you choose the same channel as a microphone. This has many uses, including recording specific sounds, sending specific sounds through applications like Skype, etc. I assume this is what VAC does? I actually need to try the trial of VAC since I have not really played with it. Still, this is probably too complicated.

THe last time I tried Soundtap, it kept splitting recordings into tons and tons of little files so I quit using it.

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2015-05-01 17:22:46 (edited by bcs993 2015-05-01 17:23:38)

I think in soundtap you need to change the silence time of the mic to a very high number for that not to happen. I can't exactly remember the setting, though.

Brendan
-----
There is one rule above all others for being a man.  Whatever comes, face it on your feet.
@bcs993 on twitter, feel free to follow!

2015-05-01 17:32:24

Open Broadcaster Software is a program that allows you to stream your audio/video to sites such as Twitch. It also allows you to record, basically going into offline streaming mode. It records full system audio as well as your microphone, and doesn't really have any latency issues, given a relatively ok PC setup. Given that you only want audio, you can set the video settings in to the lowest possible. You will have to open the resulting MP4 in Goldwave, and then save the audio, but this to me is much easier than setting up VAC.

Kai

Spill chuck you spots!

2015-05-01 19:30:39

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys. I'll have a look at some of these programs and see what I think.

Regarding the comment on virtual audio cable not being complex, I disagree. The amount of things you have to do in order to get it to output several programs is pretty astounding. I have a really good podcast in my possession that explains it all, but I'm really struggling. Which, again, I'm sure means that I shouldn't try doing something like this in the first place, since it should be reasonably professional when it comes out. It doesn't help that I'm a perfectionist, and I really want to please the audiophiles, of which there are many in the blind community, as much as I despise that term.
Oddly enough, I'm more comfortable with editing the audio once it is done, since I have experience with Gold Wave.
Anyway, over the weekend I'll play around with some of these programs and see how I get on.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2015-05-02 01:59:18 (edited by musicalman 2015-05-02 02:15:34)

Hi Turtlepower and others,
As you may or may not know, I have recorded gameplays before and posted them here. As it is, there aren't many but I made a topic called yet another guy's game recordings.
The way I do those recordings is using two separate instances of Gold Wave. the first instance records stereo mix, or the sound card. The second instance records the microphone. I then save both tracks as individual files, and since I can't start both recordings at exactly the same time, I have to do some lining up. Normally what I do is try to synchronize keystrokes with their feedback. For example if I press the windows key to go to the start menu, I try to sync the key press on the microphone recording with the screen reader announcement on the sound card recording. If I can get the two files relatively close together, the final mix normally comes out fine, provided that bad things like system stalls and skips don't happen which could knock the two files out of sync.
To make the files sound more professional, I mute parts of the sound card recording which contain the screen reader speech, though normally I keep those parts unmuted on the microphone since I normally talk about things while I am navigating to the game shortcut. I also apply some effects on the microphone such as noise reduction, gating, and compression. For the most part the sound card track remains unprocessed. I then mix the two files together in such a way that my microphone is slightly louder than the game audio but I try not to overpower it. After the two files are mixed together, I'll apply a final conservative touch of compression to avoid distortion and convert to mp3.
FYI I also keep flac versions of all of my recordings if anyone wanted them. I was going to put them someplace, maybe a bt sync? but there's already a gameplays bt sync folder and although I haven't joined it yet, I'd guess large flac files aren't preferred there.
The other way I record gameplays is to use virtual audio cable. I normally do this if I want something quick. Virtual audio cable isn't complex if you keep things simple. Just launch the audio repeater application, set the input to your microphone, the output to your sound card, and adjust the delay to around 80 and press the start button. You'll be hearing yourself through headphones on a slight delay which may take some time to get used to. Then use your recording program to record stereo mix or whatever your sound card calls it, and the microphone and the game will both be picked up, though you won't have anywhere near as much control over the mix as you would with the method I described above. Where things get complicated is if you want to do more intricate things. While a mixer is definitely the professional way to go, it's not going to make things much easier. Virtual cables are going to be replaced with physical ones instead. Having physical cables instead of virtual ones can be easier for a lot of people but I think it would still be pretty daunting for someone who isn't familiar with signal routing.

Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
If you like what you're reading, please give a thumbs-up.

2015-05-02 05:00:06

Oh, see, that makes a lot more sense now. Thank you. I thought that you had to route each application that you wanted to record through virtual audio cable, and I had no idea how I was going to accomplish that.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2015-05-02 05:39:20

I just downloaded sound tap, so next time I reboot my computer I am going to test it out with a demo of my tts preschool album.

be a hero and stop Coppa now!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dkm … DkWZ8/edit
-id software, 1995

2015-05-02 18:04:13 (edited by musicalman 2015-05-02 18:05:50)

You could do it that way Turtlepower, but that would likely be overkill, and would not work too well on most computers, because the consumer level  sound drivers that most computers are equipped with isn't meant for anything more than playing and recording from one audio device. Once you start using virtual cables to route things to each other, for example routing a microphone back to the headphones and then recording this routed signal, then you start getting delay.
The reason you would route certain applications to a virtual cable is if you say, wanted to send the game to one cable and some other application to another cable to keep their audio separate from each other. Then you would have to route all the cable audio back to the sound card to hear what you were doing. I've done it before, and while it's not complicated if you understand the logic, it is still painful from the execution side because of the delay which will quickly stack up with multiple audio repeaters being chained together. For a gameplay recording though, you shouldn't have to be too worried about using multiple cables and audio repeaters. Using the simple approach I described in my post above will still get the job done. If you have any problems/questions, let us know.

Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
If you like what you're reading, please give a thumbs-up.

2015-05-26 12:42:21

I am thinking to buy headphones for my brother. Actually he lost his old pair of headphones. I am going back to home for a few days so thinking to buy a good pair of headphones as it would be a best gift for him. Please suggest the best headphone brands as I have no idea about them!

2015-05-26 19:00:47

there is also bb flashback which is screen recording software that can record both speaker and microphone at the same time. it's available at www.bbsoftware.co.uk

be a hero and stop Coppa now!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dkm … DkWZ8/edit
-id software, 1995

2015-05-26 23:15:19 (edited by austingrace 2015-05-26 23:16:11)

Hello to all. I want to get back into broadcasting again. I would need to broadcast the audio mix over a shoutcast/icecast server. I'd like to broadcast my microphone and then play some music as well but not broadcast my screen reader over the radio. I don't want to record the output. I want to stream it live in real time. I'm not sure if i need spl though. That seems overkill for my needs and I really don't have the money to do that right now anyway. It will be a more of a hobby thing.

2015-11-17 02:29:18

Dragging this topic up from the dead, because I have a related question that I hope someone can help me with.

So, as I said recently in another topic, I've solved the mysteries of VAC. I'm comfortable using it now, and am enjoying all it offers. But one thing that sucks is that, if you want to record something like a game walkthrough, or anything that doesn't have its own dedicated option to switch what sound device it goes to, you have no choice but to place your entire system on one of the virtual lines. This is all well and good for some things, but not so much for games, particularly not the action-packed types of games I prefer, and would like to record. There's a noticeable lag between when I press a key and when the game responds.

I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this question, but I figured I'd ask anyway. Is there a program or something that can force other programs such as games, whose sound device you can't change through normal means, onto another device such as a virtual cable?

If not, is it just a matter of getting used to the slower response time? It seems to me, as I've had to perform several tests to get my audio levels right, that maybe the game is still responding as it should, and I won't end up dying more often as a result of it being slower, it's just the fact that it has to be repeated through the two virtual cables I have set up.

I'm not sure if it matters, but I have a Realtech card (yeah, I know, try not to laugh), and I can also explain how I set up VAC if that would help.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.