Wednesday 23 October 2013

How to Screen record on Android

Pasted Image 23 10 2013 11 26

Screen Recording On Android

What I do is to make tutorial videos showing users how to get the best from their Mac, iPad and iPhone and also now Android devices. Recording from the Mac is very easy because I use an application called ScreenFlow, all I have to do is to start the recorder and do my stuff and everything is recorded, video and audio. Recording from the iPad is also extremely easy because I have available to me an application called Reflector which wirelessly sends the data from the iPad to my Mac and once again I can use ScreenFlow to record whatever I am doing. After having got myself a couple of Android devices I have had to do a search for something that will work for recording the screen as a video.

BBQScreen Connect and Untitled and MarsEdit 2

BBQ Screen

This BBQ application works in the same way as Mac app Reflector, but not as good. Sometimes it works fine and other times it is finicky and occasionally completely unresponsive. I have successfully made a couple of videos with it using the app on my Samsung Galaxy S3, but as yet I have been unable to make it work on my Nexus 7. I really wanted to be able to do the recordings from the Nexus 7 due to having a larger space to work with so that it would be less fiddly.

SCR screen recorder does the business

SCR Screen Recorder Free ★root Android Apps on Google Play

So something had to be done to find a successful way of recording from the Nexus 7. Today I tried out a free application called SCR Screen Recorder and immediately it worked fine on the device. The quality of the video is just spot on and it also recorded the audio without any problems. I still have to see if it will record when I have my good microphone plugged into it. (Yes it does) Another thing that I might do with the audio is to also record into my Mac at the same time using Amadeus Pro and then I can use the facilities within Final Cut Pro 10 to match them up.

In some ways it is not as convenient to use SCR Recorder because I have my video editing on my Mac. So far I have not found any good video editing applications that are good enough to use for the Android. What I have to do is to move the video from the Android device to my Mac. I can plug it in as a USB storage device and easily copy from the application to a folder on my Mac. I'm not too keen on using this because I have found that if I do this via USB its messes up the connection to my USB microphone. I would have to do a reboot of the system to get the microphone working again. The other possibility is to use AirDroid and although it is slower than using a cable it works well enough for moving the file to my Mac.

Good quality video screen recording on Android

The quality and the size of the video is just about okay for the screen testing given me a 720 pixel high HD recording. The width of the video should be 1280, but isn't so I might have to do a little bit of letterboxing to get to the exact size it should be. Not a huge problem! The first video I did as a test of this way of recording the screen from my Nexus 7 I have put up onto Google plus and you can see it in this post below. I have now completed a couple of tutorials using SCR Screen Recorder and I am pleased with the results. I was able to get around the slight mismatch in the size, video ratio of the video clips and in the end it look quite good.

Friday 4 October 2013

Boo hoo Audioboo

Making an audio boo

Today I created an audioboo on my Mac at home using my Samson CO3U microphone and Amadeus Pro, but I didn’t have time to upload it before I left the house so I moved the file to an application /service called Dropped. I use this on my Android device when I want to quickly have a file sent to Dropbox and for it to be automatically syncronised to the other computers I have. It didn’t seem to work so well going from the Mac to the Android as I still have to download the file to the devices.

Sending from Dropbox

The next trick I have to perform was to have that file uploaded to Audioboo. My first try from Dropbox was only going to send a link to the file and not the actual file itself, so that wasn’t going to work. I think that was because the file hadn’t been downloaded to the device beforehand. So I downloaded the file into my downloads folder and then tried again. I still had to go to an application that I use for looking at the files on my Android. ES FileExplorer is an application which is very useful to have that lets me get into files in a way that I’m not able to do with iOS. It requires a press and hold down to select the file and then I was able to share out using Gmail.

Or direct out of Gmail?

I did wonder if I would be able to pick up a file to share out from within gmail, but it didn’t work out that way. I was given the option of sharing out a picture or a video, but there is nothing in there to let me share out any other file or specifically some audio. In any case I was able to get the file uploaded to audio boo by using e-mail. There is a special boo mail e-mail address and with that it goes straight to the audio boo servers.

Work arounds

There is a specific audioboo application for Android, but it is still in beta and it doesn’t really work very well. So I have had to find out a workaround , so that I can record an Audioboo and send from my Android devices.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

The range tool in the Audio editing app for Android

Audio Evolution Mobile on Android

Nice update to the look of the application and it looks more professional and makes it a joy to use. In the video I look at how to use the range tool. Basically you can use this tool to cut copy and paste sections of audio and that means one one track or multiple tracks too. Very easy to use and I am pleased that I bought this app to use for recording Audioboos on the Galaxy S3 and now on the Nexus 7.

Wednesday 11 September 2013

Nexus 7 or What?

Apple News


SO all that Apple could manage was a fingerprint scanner and a faster chip. Well I suppose the camera is a bit better too.... Still not impressed enough though to warrant me changing back to the iPhone from my Samsung Galaxy S3.

So tempted to get a Nexus 7

I have nearly pulled the trigger on getting one a couple of times. So many people saying that it is brilliant and well worth getting. Such good kit and great value for money. Even as I am writing this I can feel the tugs on my credit card to have one sent to me. Trouble is, I still love using the iPad and I know that if I get the Nexus I will more likely pick up the smaller lighter and easier to carry around Nexus 7. Would be great to have a device that always will be getting the latest upgrades of Android as soon as they become available.

What do you think? Should I do it?

Tuesday 3 September 2013

Draft App for Android

After getting to really like the application on iOS called Drafts I was looking to see if I could find an application on Android that would perform the same purpose. So what I was looking for was an occasion that let me put in text quickly and easily and let me show it out to various places just as easy. It is quite likely that the developer of this Draft for Android has had the idea of copying the ideas and philosophy of this application. Draft isn't as good as the app that is trying to emulate but it is still quite good to use.



You can easily create text documents and markdown documents from within the application or by using a widget. Having the wishes on one of your screens on your device makes it very simple and quick to get into creating your text. This is what you want in a notetaking application.

Sharing out is very easy and it works in two different ways depending upon whether you are the viewing mode editing mode. You are anything you see the option to export as as perfect as HTML.

Saturday 17 August 2013

Testing MarkDrop

I was wondering if it was possible to share from the MarkDrop application and I took a long while to find how, but it is possible. Now I want to test it to find out how many places I can share it out to.

Friday 16 August 2013

Writing, Blogging And Note Taking Part Three

Back to Part Two

Overview

It pays to be organised and to make some good choices for how you're going to enter text. My personal preference is to dictate as much as possible and that is whether I'm using my iPad, my Galaxy S3 or my iMac. The dictation available on the Mac is the best with DragonDictate. I'm finding that for mobile dictation the better of the two is the Android service although the Siri based dictation is usable. When it comes to typing on the mobile devices then once again the Android device wins due to the fact that often I often only have to tap the screen once to put in a complete word. I love the way that it intelligently guesses the word I want next as well as the words I'm typing as I go. I really miss that feature when I go back to the iPad and I need to do some text entry with the keyboard.

Which apps to use

I prefer to use Evernote although it is a notetaking application for the curation of information I get from elsewhere. I will sometimes add text to it to supplement my collection of notes. For the quick note which is to capture an idea, on my Mac I will always use Mou as my first choice, but occasionally I remember that I have NVAlt.

 

Quick notes on iOS I will always use Drafts and I therefore have no requirement for any other notetaking application. It is quite good sometimes to prune away some of the unused applications from the system then I can always choose the one application to always know where to find any notes that I have made. Another possibility for taking notes on iOS is to use one of the applications that allows handwriting. Some of these handwriting-based applications will actually do an OCR so that you can at a later stage make a search through those notes. Seeing as I have scribbly unreadable handwriting I don't tend to use these applications very often, but it is nice to have them available just in case.

Draft on Android

Draft notetaking app for Android is not perfect but performs the task of text entry capture very well. I have found that when I write markdown in Draft that it works perfectly, also when I share it out to use those notes on other platforms in other applications. It doesn't work so well the other way round as when I bring markdown text into Draft, it doesn't read the format very well and I lose the spaces in between the paragraphs. On a long document it would be very tedious to put them back in again so I just don't bring in markdown from elsewhere. Draft, even though it is not perfect still gets a thumbs up from NoStylus, just so long as you remember its limitations.

Go To Part One

Friday 9 August 2013

How to Edit Audio on Your Android Device Using Audio Evolution Mobile

Following my defection to the Android way of doing things after years of being an iOS iPhone user, I wanted to have something that would allow me to record audio. I searched and found a number of applications, but none of them were quite as good as Twisted Wave. Eventually I found an application which looked like it might do what I needed and it is called Audio Evolution Mobile. It took a little while to get used to it, but now that I have got used to it I am quite pleased with it. It is a multitrack audio editor which allows me to zoom right into the audio wave on a timeline, so that I can make changes to the audio very accurately.

free applications

 

Using the editing tools of Audio Evolution Mobile

Generally I'm using this audio editor or DAW digital audio workstation for Android to edit for podcast or for Audioboo, but is also good for musicians. Mostly what I need to do, is to select parts of the audio where I have fluffed a couple of words and delete them. Then what I need to do is to get rid of the empty space by moving the recorded audio back together. Fortunately with Audio Evolution Mobile on the Samsung Galaxy S3 it is quite easy to do this sort of editing. There is a range selection tool which I haven't used very much yet, but it allows you to select a portion of your audio and do things with it. It is very easy to use the cutting tool to split a track and then to use edit tool to either lengthen or shorten the beginning or end of an audio sample.

Adding audio effects to your tracks

It is quite easy to select a track and add a number of audio effects to that track. You can add bandpass, chorus, compressor, delay, dual delay, flanger, highpass, lowpass, noise gate, reverb, reverse delay and tremolo. So there are plenty of effects that you can choose from and you can apply to just the one track. You get to hear the effects when you mix down the audio to export it out.

Audio evolution mobile

If you want to record to a specific track you can choose to arm that track and record to it. It is also possible to either mute a track so that you can listen to the others, or maybe you need to hear just one single track of all of the tracks you have recorded. There is a control for panning from left to right for a track which musicians might use, but so far I have not needed. It is also possible to adjust the gain for a specific track if you need to have it louder or quieter than the other tracks.

Adjusting the audio frequencies of the track

You get different sounds from different microphones and for example with my Giant Squid lapel microphone my voice sounds better if I reduce the level slightly at 1000 kHz. Within this Audio Evolution Mobile application for Android it is possible for me to alter the gain for specific frequencies which is a way of refining EQ settings. There are also other ways to adjust sound either for specific groups of audio or you can alter the master setting.

An overview of the application Audio Evolution Mobile

After using the application a number of times I have found it to be stable and very useful. There have been a couple of updates since I started using it and it also has become more reliable. I experienced a couple of crashes early on, but now the application seems to be rock solid. I still need to explore what can be done with the range selection tool and I have only just found out that is also possible to add markers. I can recommend this tool for recording audio on Android and it doesn't really matter that it is not possible to export out to MP3, as I can easily do a conversion of the final mix down using another Android application for converting audio called Media Converter.

Monday 8 July 2013

Root and Toot

Getting Rooted!

So I have had the Samsung Galaxy S3 for a month and as I said in my last post, I am generally quite happy with the phone and the Android system. I am a little bit bothered with the fact that I have had a few of crashes of the phone and sometimes it will restart itself without me asking it to. So there are occasions when I look at the phone and I find that I need to put in the PIN and I don't know how long the phone has not been working for. I am a member of a community on Google plus for Samsung Galaxy S3, a number of people on there recommend rooting the phone and also trying out other versions of the operating system. As part of my experiment and also because of general geekiness/nerdiness I will have to give a try to doing these projects. It will be another line of enquiry that I will be able to report upon in the NoStylus blogs.

 

Getting a tutorial for S3 rooting On YouTube

There are scripts that you can use on the Windows side of things and also there are some for the Mac. It seems that the scripts that will root your phone from your Mac are a little bit pernickety has to whether they will work or not. So I am following instructions on taking certain files from the Android SDK to be able to do a manual rooting of the Samsung Galaxy S3. I am a little bit bothered with the fact that I have to install Java, considering there have been some security problems with Java during the previous six months. I am going to do it anyway and just keep my fingers crossed.

Strike number two for Galaxy S3 rooting

Well I just followed the instructions in the YouTube videos in which I downloaded various files and I'm pretty sure that I did the steps of the job properly. I got close to the end of the process when I hit a roadblock. I was entering instructions into the Terminal window and up until that point everything was going great. The phone is still unrooted and I will have to find another way to root the Galaxy S3. It was all very geeky and nerdy and fun for someone like me and I haven't given up yet.
It is supposed to be very easy to do this job on a Windows computer, but I don't have one of those. I do know where I could probably get access to a Windows computer for a short amount of time and maybe I will give that a go. Before I do that I will have a look to see if there is any way that I can get around the problem that I encountered today.

Saturday 6 July 2013

One month with the Samsung Galaxy S3

The change from iPhone to Galaxy S3

Right from the start I loved the newness of the swap form one operating system to another. I was scary and refreshing. I love to find out new things about different technology so this experiment has be just brilliant for me. I have been using iOS and the iPhone for four years before this and making the change from iOS to Android has been interesting. Lots of new things to try and stuff to work out and sometimes make workarounds for things that I was able to do on the iPhone. So far nothing has completely stumped me and the plusses have been far greater in number and amplitude than any of the minuses.

Loading up with software

I got a photo app that came in from a place other than the Play Store and mostly it worked out. It has a great sphere photo function that is really easy to use. I just have to put the spot in the cross hairs and it takes the next picture for the 360 sphere. The first I did I was able to get online and spin it around, but the second one I did would go up as a sphere. I need to try out other ways of doing it. I must have forgotten exactly what I did to upload it.

Changing over from iCloud services to Google Services

Seemed that the best thing to do was to use Google calendar and contact apps / services as it was easier to get that data into the phone that it would be to get the iCloud stuff available on the S3. It needs some tweaking still to get it working just right but I don't have so much time to be able to work with it.

Audioboo Podcasts

I was doing these most days but I have less time and the App for Audioboo was not too reliable when I started using it. I have just done one Audioboo and it worked out great. Very easy and the boo was uploaded really quickly. I was kind of shocked.

Sunday 9 June 2013

Loving my Galaxy S3

Very easy to use indeed.

I’m pleased at I’m getting on well with the Galaxy S3. And I have been learning more about how to set up my new smartphone. For the moment, I’m really preferring the smartphone is that the Samsung Galaxy S3 works compared to the the iphone

Blogger or Wordpress?

Up until now all of my web sites are on the word press platform, but I have also started a new 1 on blogger com. Today I was able to download an application and I am hoping that it will it possible for me to send a blog post from the Draft application directly into blogger. There is an app with a similar name on iOS called Drafts which has hooks into all manor of destinations. I would like to see this evolve to be just like it.

Saturday 8 June 2013

Getting Started as an Android User

Android Newbie

Just got the Galaxy S3 even though the S4 has just become available. Delighted with the first few days of using the device. I have loaded up a few apps and I have even paid for a few of them. One I have only just this minute bought is Draft and I am so pleased that the app gives me easy access to the Markdown syntax. I tried out Denote and Mark Dawn but neither did the job that I was expecting it to do and they will now be deleted, never to be seen again.
Not all is perfect, like the couple of times I have had to wait too long for the device to start up from sleep and once I had to turn it off and back on again to get it running again. A couple of times I thought it was slow to operate on a task, but I am in the honeymoon period and still quite forgiving. Probably as I get further into the Android way of doing things I will be more aware of what I should expect.

Bye Bye iPhone

I am not even a little bit sad right now that I will be saying bye bye to the iPhone as the Samsung Galaxy S3 is such a fresh new plaything for me. Lots of new things to try and plenty to fiddle and twiddle with. The configurability of the device is astonishing. I will writing all about this on the Nostylus Blog and I expect to be making a video or two also to put on the Wizardgold Channel. Maybe I will have to set up a different channel for the Android stuff.