If you have tried to capture internal game or screen audio from your Android smartphone you might be surprised that this is now allowed as a policy and many people failed to come up with a solution.
Most screen recording apps use the phone’s inbuilt microphone to record the phone’s speakers which will lead to a massive decrease in audio quality. Others tried to hack/root their phones to enable that feature. Only legitimate solution right now is an external audio (or video&audio) capture device. Seeing is believing, so check out the video for a guide on how to use this device and a real example using the Monument Valley 2 game.
How about connecting your phone’s audio-out to a common headphone&mic combo port on your laptop and record that way? Seems like a good idea but that doesn’t work because microphones need a 4-pin audio plug and support mono only. You will need a legitimate stereo line-in port which is only supported by higher-end soundcards or dedicated devices.
Having done my research, I did buy the “V.TOP USB 2.0 audio capture” device for ca. 20€ because it did have good reviews online. The device has input connectors for RCA/chinch and 3.5mm stereo. The package includes male/female couplers so it doesn’t matter if your audio source has male or female connectors. We get a driver CD as well which I did not need under Win7 64 bit as it already had a driver. The USB 2.0 connector on the other end of the device is plugged into a PC and it will register as a stereo microphone.
The choice of recording software for your PC/Mac is plentiful but I recommend Audacity freeware which is a more advanced audio recording and editing program. The V.Top device will register as “Microphone array (USB PnP audio device)” and you have to select it from the microphone menu. Set the input mode to stereo and adjust the input levels. Click the record button and see if the sound levels seem alright and save the audio once you finished editing it.
The V.TOP device does not support internal recording to a SD Card so you have to connect it to an external PC/Mac. Second point to consider is that the digital-analog conversion and back will degrade or at least change the audio quality depending on the quality of the audio components. I did not notice any loss in quality considering it’s just game audio but this solution might not satisfy audiophiles.
Of course you can use this device to capture any audio source like old cassette or vinyl players as well.
Thanks for reading! You can check out more of this blog or my YouTube channel.
PANORAMA CIRCLE 