Record video with a USB mic on Android

We just started recording video clips for the blog a couple of weeks ago. We used our Sony Xperia Tablet Z5 for the recording and the video quality is acceptable. But it didn’t take long for us to realize that the sound was lacking in more than one way. The volume was too low, background sound was too high and it just gives a cheap and unprofessional feel to the whole video. Solution? Lets just record video with a USB mic on Android.

So we looked around and found that the Yeti, from Blue Microphones, was a good and quite affordable mic. What we didn’t realize was that the people recommending the microphone were using it for recording podcasts and audio, not video. This came as a quite unpleasant surprise when we unpacked the Yeti and didn’t get it to work with anything. We were able to record audio, but which ever camera app we tried on the tablet, the only audio it picked up was from the internal microphone. By bedtime I had gotten it to work on our Windows 10 laptop. The trick there was to inactivate the internal mic. But since the computer has a like 2 MP webcam we didn’t want to use the as an alternative.

Normally in these situations, the internet is ones best friend. You make a couple of searches and find the answer in some tech forum where someone has had the same concern as you. But the only results we found was that Android 5.0 finally enables USB audio. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work while recording video with your camera. Or does it?

The solution:

After installing, testing and uninstalling a dussin camera apps or so I finally found one that works! Best thing is that its free! The app that allows and can find an external USB microphone (like the Blue Yeti) is Open camera. How you get it to work? Simple:

1. Download and install open camera on your Android device. Make sure you device has Android 5.0 or higher and supports OTG (On-The-Go) USB.
2. Connect the Blue Yeti to your device via a USB OTG cable with, a male micro USB connector-to-female full size USB port.
3. Make sure your device has found detected the USB mic. If it has, the microphones diode will light up. If it doesn’t do this automatically, try going to setting -> device connectivity -> Connect USB device (on an Xperia).
4. Start the Open Camera app.
5. Go to settings -> video setting -> audio source and choose “External mic (if present)”.
6. Set any other settings you need to get the right video quality and start recording your video.

There are probably other camera apps out there that work with a USB mic other than Open Camera. If you’ve found any alternatives that work well, please write in the comments below.

Good luck!

Detta inlägg skrev vi på engelska eftersom vi upptäcke att det inte fanns ett svar på vår fråga någonstans i våra söknigar och vi vill kunna nå och hjälpa andra vilsna googlare.