Recording Android Apps With Sound!

I wrote my first android app about 6 months ago now. It was a pretty simple affair. My daughter is about 2 years old, and she was just starting to learn her colors. What better way, I thought, to teach her them, than to write a little app that shows and says the colors. Color Bubbles was born, (here for Apple).

Pretty simple stuff, but my kid loved it. It took almost no time to get a prototype together, it was about as simple as apps get, but it still took me a few months to get it all wrapped up. I already knew Java, so getting all that working was simple, but then I decided to try and make it multi-platform. I managed, but I spent a fair while (and an extra $99) to make it happen (Spoiler Alert: I haven't recouped costs yet!).

Anyway, I finally managed to get it released on both platforms, but my final hurdle was getting a video of the app in action, with sound. You'd think it would be easy, but no, apparently it's not. If you're interested in increasing the budget of your app even more, there are a bunch of places willing to take your money to create a video and let the world know about your app. I won't judge if you do it. This woman does look like she knows what she's doing...

Like I said, cheap, I mean, it's only a starting price of $279!

Well I created a simple video for the app with no sound, but without the sound it looks like somebody's running a test to make sure the monitor colors work right. I heard a rumor about CyanogenMod adding screencasting capabilities, so I spent a night rooting, then flashing, then flashing again, then flashing one last time (maybe this is the one!). Finally it worked. I was so happy, two hours of messing around and finally I can record the sound on my app. But wait, no, the sound doesn't work. Apparently nobody thought mentioning that was worthwhile!

Anyway, not to bore you with my long list of nights wasted (it's very long), but I finally came up with a solution, and it's free. Presenting you with Genymotion and CamStudio.

Genymotion is an alternative to the android emulator that actually works. I'd never used it before Monday, but I tried it out because a friend mentioned it not working (he was wrong). I've always just debugged on my phone and tablet, and left it there, but now I can see this would be a great alternative. It's smooth and it starts up really quick (2-0 to android emulator). It's so fast in fact, that it even runs my app at full speed with sound. Genymotion is free for personal use, but ramps up quickly in price if you want to use it in a professional way. Unfortunately recording the screen is not free, but that's where CamStudio comes in.

CamStudio is a little open source project that lets you record the screen of your computer to file with very little hassle. There's a couple of codec options and it lets you record only a section of the screen if you want. One weird quirk was that the website for CamStudio (not the sourceforge link above) seems to have a dodgy download that contains a trojan. Obviously, don't do that, and follow the link I gave and you'll be fine (you're already using a good antivirus that would have caught that anyway, right?).

So, I used both of these applications together and voila, here are the results.

If you're interested in the app, please download it, it's only $0.99 and even though my kid is now 6 months older than when she first saw it, she still loves it. It goes without saying that she knows her colors now as well, but I don't know if I can take all the credit for that!