Recorder app distorted sound

Using /e/OS Applications
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1

Hi all,

Brand new FP6 user here. I use my phone quite a lot for quick-and-dirty recordings of my playing on pipe organs/piano etc, to check progress… i just tried the Recorder app and it just returned horrible distorted audio, even at low sound levels. Anyone had this? It’s marginally better with my voice near the mic but still not really acceptable. My 5yo Moto G7+ returned clear undistorted recordings with a basic free app, even with very high levels (a church organ at full volume)! I’d rather not have to install another app with ads/trackers so if anyone can recommend one?

Cheers

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in this thread it came up for an FP6 user

naive question, did you try to flip the switch for “record in high quality” and does it make a difference? (it does, “like a lot” on a FP3)

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Hi, thanks for the reply! Yes it’s set to high quality (whatever that means). I assume it’s just a higher bitrate.

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I tried it in high quality, too. Both quality levels are terrible in the LineageOS recorder (low: super muffled, high: tinny reverberations plus hissy noise) while the Fossify voice recorder works well.

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I wonder what goes wrong for the FP6 here when using the HQ option. Can you inspect an hq file as to its properties? VLC can show it. On the FP3 the

  • high quality recording is a 44.1khz sample rate 1411.2 kbps wav/pcm - very clear
  • low quality recording is 8khz 12.2 kbps AAC-LC - will sound inevitably narrowbandy / muffled
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I’m not used to code, but there is definitely a serious issue. Is there a way to attach a short audio file here to show what I mean? The audio sounds like distortion from clipping, and it seems like a bandwidth/sample rate issue rather than mic overload as it happens at any input level, but is worse with audio containing a wide frequency range (like a pipe organ!)

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here’s two services that allow audio clip shares:

  • sndup.net - will take m4a / wav unaltered - more interesting to see the original file imo
  • whyp.it - 24h valid, transcodes to mp3
1 Like
8

there’s an issue now on FP6 audio quality recording (within videos, but works out the same). It has 3 examples where I wonder which one fits your experience.

One issue with the samples is - they’re transcoded to flac, original would’ve been better.

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Hey, yeah the second one (FP6 camera) is exactly the issue I had with the /e/os recorder app. Any “background noise” (basically anything that’s not near-field to the mic) is severely distorted. I am using Fossify now and it’s OK, but still far from the quality I could get from my Moto G7+ with Audio Recorder app.

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I have tried other recorders (e.g Audio Recorder by Dimitriy Ponomarenko) which work well on other phones, that also have the same issue, so it’s something to do with the phone’s encoding of mic signals, rather than a fault of the /e/os app. Fossify only gets around it my having options for raw mic input. This is probably why other users have reported poor call quality?