Screen recordings - Mac Catalina

[Dave2002]

Sometimes I discover strange things by playing with software, such as the sounds of scrubbing when I use a video, audio editor or DAW. Today I wanted to try to capture this in video - with sound - so I reverted back to Quicktime. After several attempts I managed to capture the video, but even after finding the options etc. I still couldn't record sound. I could have played the sound through the speakers, and recorded it from the microphone, but that's not what I wanted to do, nor would it have been particularly good practice.

I can't remember if I've ever succeeded with this before. If I really wanted to do this, and there was no other way, I could record the sounds separately, and then merge the audio and video in a video editor - but surely there should be a way to do it without having to do that. Maybe I need another sound plug-in. So far all I've got is the inbuilt microphone, plus 2 ch and 64 ch Soundflower, which show up in the sound preferences.

I'm not sure if Catalina is part of the problem. The only thing it did which made a slight difference was it insisted that I set Screen sharing for the Quicktime program, without which that would not work.

[Lordgeous]

Ive gone round those circles. Recordinding sound with screen video capture seems almost impossible. I tried a couple of programmes which claimed to do it - but the didnt! Grrrrrr...

[Dave2002]

Ive gone round those circles. Recordinding sound with screen video capture seems almost impossible. I tried a couple of programmes which claimed to do it - but they didnt! Grrrrrr...

That's a shame. If it was just a question of getting a soundtrack I could do that separately, and resynchronise it, but in this case the point was the spontaneous improvisation on the user interface, and its interaction with the sound which i was trying to capture, I can probably do it some other way, but it's needlessly complicated. As it is using Quicktime still presents problems as the start/stop button gets hidden away, so one ends up with another 30 or so seconds (maybe more) of unwanted video to be trimmed away, both at the beginning and end. I'm not sure if Apple have a replacement for Quicktime or what they recommend (if anything ...) for this kind of screen recording nowadays. As you say, GRRRrrrr!

[Dave2002]

I've made slight progress - which looked promising - but up to now hasn't actually achieved success. In Mojave (which I skipped) and Catalina the option cmd+Space 5 brings up screen capture options, including movies. I think essentially the screen capture is Quicktime, which I tried explicitly before. That works - but still doesn't sort out the audio.

I also found this article about screen recording - and a newer tool called Blackhole - https://www.musictech.net/news/blackhole-audio-routing/ for audio routing. I've downloaded that, but I'm still having difficulty getting the audio routing sorted. This page of help seemed to point the way - https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/...-Output-Device but so far I've not got any useful audio with the videos I've recorded.

As with trying to get Midi devices working, this seems to need the use of the Audio Midi Setup utility program as well as configuring the sound inputs/outputs in System Preferences. Just using System Preferences by itself won't work I think. Many people perhaps won't notice the extra step using the Audio Midi Setup which is required.

Mmmm. Still work in progress. Something has happened, as I had to reset the sound to get other things to work after playing with this, but still a "good try, but no cigar ...".

[Dave2002]

Finally ....

I think following ALL the instructions in this video gets a result - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7UE...ature=youtu.be

If at first you don't succeed ....

I'm going to give this guy a thumbs up!

Some neat techniques - such as renaming the routing functions, so that they're more obvious, sensibly named, and appear in pop up lists.

It's still pretty tricky, though.

[Dave2002]

One swallow doesn't make a summer - they say. Indeed, maybe several swallows.

The procedure given in msg 5 works - "sometimes"! It seems to depend on the application being used. For example, if Youtube is opened in a browser such as Firefox or Chrome it'll probably (based on a very small sample ...!!!) work. If other applications, such as DAWS - Logic etc. are opened, it may not work - even with repeated attempts. This is a shame, which means that if one wants to show some features of such programs, the only reliable way is to do the screen recording and at the same time record the sound track to an external recorder. This really is an unwanted complication.

I can't understand why Apple are so determined to make this difficult. This kind of issue seems to have been going on for centuries, and led to the development of Soundflower - which used bits of internal Apple code - or similar, but that seems to have gradually fallen apart. Blackhole seems to have followed a similar route. Maybe Apple really doesn't want people to do this kind of thing - but why? Perhaps it's because they feel that people will do illegal things such as recording copyrighted videos shown on computer screens. Why should they care? It's hardly going to cause them a problem, is it? If people do do such illegal things, then that's their problem, not Apple's. If it were, then every gun manufacturer in the USA would have a problem every time someone is shot and killed, but as we know "it's people who kill people, not guns". [no comment].

Maybe Apple can't control its own code, so it can't actually produce a screen recorder which works properly. What is the reason for this?