3.5mm Mic?

[Zilliano]

The 3.5mm jack on top of the Eris takes input- or so I've heard, in regards to headsets and such.

If so, is there any way I could use a mic with a 3.5mm jack and record, instead of the internal phone mic?


The Eris would be a great little portable audio recorder for when I'm creating movies, but as per all phones, the mic is nothing to even consider for decent audio.

Any ideas?

 

[OfTheDamned]

You can use a 3.5mm headset with mic just like any other phone can. I have not tried to use a mic by itself though. Worth a test if you need the function. If you stop by an office supply store or radio shack, they will probably have a computer mic that you could test out.

You may also like to try something like this too.

HiFi MP3 & OGG Audio Recorder v1.9 Application for Android | Multimedia

MP3 & OGG Audio Recorder Lite v1.10 Application for Android | Multimedia

 

[Kutanks]

i would like a splitter or something that lets me have a wired mike and a headphone port to plug my tape adapter into the car. I use my eris to listen to music and its really annoying to have to take out the plug to answer a call.

 

[mc48]

i would like a splitter or something that lets me have a wired mike and a headphone port to plug my tape adapter into the car. I use my eris to listen to music and its really annoying to have to take out the plug to answer a call.

when i am listening to music in my car with the tape adapter and I get a call I don't ever have to unplug it to answer a call. I believe it automatically stops the music and puts the phone into speaker mode for the call. You hear the caller thru the car speakers and talk into the phone speaker. I haven't run into any problems doing it like this...except that your passengers are of course also privy to the conversation.

 

[ReJe75]

I don't haver to unplug works great through car speakers and phone mic for me too. Does yours do something different?



Sent from my Eris using Tapatalk

 

[ReJe75]

OP... I am curious what you find out so please post back when you get or all figured out.



Sent from my Eris using Tapatalk

 

[Zilliano]

Well, I plugged in a mic into the 3.5mm jack, and it gave me the headphone symbol....
But I tried to record with the Voice Recorder App (The built in one)
And it didn't work.

I would try the HiFi thing if it were not 6 freggin' dollars. Downloading the trial to test right now, though....

 

[Zilliano]

Just tried the trial. No dice, it only seems to use the built-in mic.

I suppose this is a coding issue. :/

 

[Kutanks]

Next time im in the car im gonna try to answer the call without unpluging then. The 2k4 prius im driving has bluetooth but I can't seem to get it to sync correctly.

 

[Zilliano]

Well, as it turns out, the jack only takes INPUT from a TRRS tip.
Which basically means I've either gotta find a mic with a TRRS end to it, or an adaptor.

 

[grvthang]

I don't think those apps are available for 1.5. I'm running 1.5 and i can't find them in the market.

 

[polizi212]

Out of curiosity I grabbed my head phone/mic that came with my old phone a Samsung Delve, and sure enough I was able to use it to record my voice with no problem. I was even able to do a google voice search using the headset.

 

[Zilliano]

Yeah, that's easy, 'cause it's a headset.
Sadly, a normal mic isn't a headset. >_<
Just gotta adapt it, I guess.

 

[goofdad]

Check my thread about splitting the mic. I use my headset buddy with a directional mic in the car all the time. It was also really nice when doing an interview with my kids around, as I was able to use my high-quality computer headset as a phone headset.

 

[grvthang]

Well, as it turns out, the jack only takes INPUT from a TRRS tip.
Which basically means I've either gotta find a mic with a TRRS end to it, or an adaptor.

Yeah, I would assume that you would have to adapt a mic so that it works on a TRRS input. I would assume that it wouldn't have the capability of recording in stereo, then. I plugged in a stereo mic with a regular 3.5 TRS tip, and it didn't seem to work with the stock recorder app.

In order to record music rehearsals, I've been using a Belkin TuneTalk stereo mic that plugs into my 3rd generation Nano, which has the capability to record in 16-bit stereo. It would be great to just plug a stereo mic into the Eris and get that capability.

 

[Zilliano]

Yeah, I don't think it's entirely a hardware issue, if the iPod can do it.
I'm sure there would be some way to enable the use of normal mics in it- My uneducated guess on this being fueled by the fact that you don't have to have special headphones to listen.

If that fails, I could do research into using a stereo mic with an adapter for the miniUSB port- beings that my old miniUSB headset from the HTC Touch still works on the Eris.

Also, thanks. I might look into one of those headset buddy things.

 

[Jethro]

Anyone find a solution for this yet? I found a splitter for the standard TRRS jack on the phone here: Computer PC Headset Smartphone Adapter, Dual 3.5mm to Single 3.5mm

Haven't tried it yet. But I would imagine the input jack would be mono, with the output being stereo. But you could probably adapt a stereo mic to mono with a simple 3.5mm adapter (or it might work straight away).

I would love to know about this as well. I have a little stereo mic I used on my MiniDisc recorder years ago. Would probably help a lot.

And I've been trying the demo of TapeMachine for recording: TapeMachine Free v1.2.9 Application for Android | Multimedia

It seems pretty cool - you have gain adjustment and a waveform while recording. And they just added FLAC. I asked the developer about being able to reduce the gain even more than you can with his app, as that is usually the biggest problem, but he's not sure it's possible with the Android O/S.

 

[Olivier]

Hi Jethro,

I am the developer of TapeMachine.

Anyone find a solution for this yet? I found a splitter for the standard TRRS jack on the phone here: Computer PC Headset Smartphone Adapter, Dual 3.5mm to Single 3.5mm

Haven't tried it yet. But I would imagine the input jack would be mono, with the output being stereo. But you could probably adapt a stereo mic to mono with a simple 3.5mm adapter (or it might work straight away).

A user of TapeMachine did try this very adapter on a HTC Incredible. Unfortunately, after a lot of research he couldn't get that to work properly. There seem to be an impedance problem which results in a constant background noise.

I believe that someone with electronic knowledge could solve this, but it's likely not to be straightforward. Of course, various phones, various results.

And I've been trying the demo of TapeMachine for recording: TapeMachine Free v1.2.9 Application for Android | Multimedia

It seems pretty cool - you have gain adjustment and a waveform while recording. And they just added FLAC. I asked the developer about being able to reduce the gain even more than you can with his app, as that is usually the biggest problem, but he's not sure it's possible with the Android O/S.

And TapeMachine now also supports Ogg Vorbis! On recent phones (ARMv7), it can even record to Ogg Vorbis in realtime On other phones, you can record to WAV or FLAC, and then convert to OGG afterwards.

About the input level, reducing it is not feasible with Android currently.

But, using the integrated mic and careful location of the phone, some users were able to record quite amazing music pieces.. I hope to set up a SoundCloud group soon to let users show the world how it sounds like

 

[Demache]

Anyone find a solution for this yet? I found a splitter for the standard TRRS jack on the phone here: Computer PC Headset Smartphone Adapter, Dual 3.5mm to Single 3.5mm

Haven't tried it yet. But I would imagine the input jack would be mono, with the output being stereo. But you could probably adapt a stereo mic to mono with a simple 3.5mm adapter (or it might work straight away).

I would love to know about this as well. I have a little stereo mic I used on my MiniDisc recorder years ago. Would probably help a lot.

And I've been trying the demo of TapeMachine for recording: TapeMachine Free v1.2.9 Application for Android | Multimedia

It seems pretty cool - you have gain adjustment and a waveform while recording. And they just added FLAC. I asked the developer about being able to reduce the gain even more than you can with his app, as that is usually the biggest problem, but he's not sure it's possible with the Android O/S.

Wow, that app has way better sound quality than the built-in one. Probably because it uses a real sound format.

I just wish there were some way to incorporate that into the video recorder. Then the audio would be much more pleasing!

 

[Olivier]

Wow, that app has way better sound quality than the built-in one. Probably because it uses a real sound format.

Thank you Actually, the storage format is only half of the problem, and it's the simplest part. The other half is the audio engine, which is extremely tricky to get right because every single phone behaves differently in regard to audio I/O.

I just wish there were some way to incorporate that into the video recorder. Then the audio would be much more pleasing!

Is this the default Droid Eris video capture app? What is the audio format in there? (You can check that out on a computer with VLC for ex.)

 

[Demache]

Is this the default Droid Eris video capture app? What is the audio format in there? (You can check that out on a computer with VLC for ex.)

The normal audio format is (s)AMR. Which is good for voice recordings, but is horrible as a video recorder format.

More info about it from VLC (though it can't play the sound). The frame rate isn't exactly correct though.

 

[Olivier]

The normal audio format is (s)AMR. Which is good for voice recordings, but is horrible as a video recorder format.

[...]

More info about it from VLC (though it can't play the sound).

8Khz, here's the problem. And a 128Kbps bitrate for this samplerate is sick. With Vorbis, at default quality, encoding a single channel 8Khz file result in 22Kbps nominal bitrate.

Anyway, the solution to this is to use a higher samplerate, and possibly another format than AMR. Isn't there any other video app which does this? Now that fast CPU/FPUs are wide-spread, it should be feasible.

 

[Demache]

8Khz, here's the problem. And a 128Kbps bitrate for this samplerate is sick. With Vorbis, at default quality, encoding a single channel 8Khz file result in 22Kbps nominal bitrate.

Anyway, the solution to this is to use a higher samplerate, and possibly another format than AMR. Isn't there any other video app which does this? Now that fast CPU/FPUs are wide-spread, it should be feasible.

I can't find any video recording apps on the market. You would think there would be at least one.

The Eris uses an older CPU, so it probably couldn't do a whole lot, but I would imagine WAV would be possible. That's what my Nokia E63 used. I believe it recorded it 48Khz, with a 128 Kbps bitrate, and that had a much weaker processor. Surprisingly, the EVO has the exact same problem. Even with HD recordings, it uses the exact same audio encoding. And since the Moto Droid has a much better sound quality in its video app, I would imagine its an HTC thing.

 

[Olivier]

I can't find any video recording apps on the market. You would think there would be at least one.

The Eris uses an older CPU, so it probably couldn't do a whole lot, but I would imagine WAV would be possible. That's what my Nokia E63 used. I believe it recorded it 48Khz, with a 128 Kbps bitrate, and that had a much weaker processor. Surprisingly, the EVO has the exact same problem. Even with HD recordings, it uses the exact same audio encoding. And since the Moto Droid has a much better sound quality in its video app, I would imagine its an HTC thing.

Ah, you're right, it's ARMv6, which means no floating point unit. Actually, you can't do any serious audio-only encoding without an FPU, so for example Theora encoding is completely out of reach.

You're right, wav requires very little resources. Actually, FLAC is extremely lightweight too. Yes, I guess HTC hasn't yet written a video app specifically for ARMv7. They may have a single app.

But if one is okay with consuming a lot of space on the sdcard, I suppose this could be done with wav and some lightweight video encoding. That said, I'm no video wizard, but I can sense that raw video frame capture with the Android SDK is certainly not a piece of cake... That will be the bottleneck I think, accessing hardware.

Also, that's quite a crazy idea, but maybe that you could try and let TapeMachine record in the background, and capture video at the same time. That's really crazy actually, but who knows...

 

[Olivier]

A small update about high audio quality in videos.

I can't find any video recording apps on the market. You would think there would be at least one.

Although I've never tried with video, it should be possible to make a such app, by using MediaRecorder. Everything is here for it in a very simple package. Also, it is possible to do video only capture with this class. This may allow to capture raw PCM audio simultaneously with AudioRecord, for WAV. In the end, both video and audio could be merged by using ffmpeg, transparently. The sole remaining problem would be A/V sync, which would need to be done manually by the user, with some +-4 seconds offset slider for example. That would certainly confuse newbies though...