How to record good audio from your smartphone with a microphone

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Editor choice How to record good audio from your smartphone with a microphone
5.5 Total Score
  • Good quality and sturdy
  • Comes with professional shirt lapel
  • Very compact
  • Good clear recording

Designed to record audio, vocals, Instruments and voiceovers, this MiC  is a little more than your average smartphone mic, because it comes from one of the brands  that make professional microphones.Rode!

Best Smartphone Mics

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Smartphones are  the invention of the century, and every second person has it in their pocket  ready  to click  photographs and record video.

It  has pretty much  taken away business from the camera companies and video cam  recording companies. However audio recording is  still done with professional equipment and Rode is just changing that  by bringing their professional expertise  to recording audio on your smartphone.

Recently I had the  opportunity to be in  video shoot and I was surprised to see that  the  cameraman  just handed me his smartphone with a RODE Smart-lav mic  fore the segment.  He had a Apple iPhone.

Best Microphone for iPhone and Android

smartlave mics

I was surprised  how  this  would work  and tested it out with my Samsung galaxy 6 and it worked fine too with crystal clear recording. When i got to see the finished recording of the video i was quite surprised,the audio quality was really good.

I was really impressed  that this mic  could just be used with plug it in to the  audio jack on phone and pressing record on your smartphone app, without having to download anything. And guess what it worked on an iPhone and Samsung as well.

The video i got to see a week later was awesome. The audio  recording was  stitched together with video by an amazing software called Final cut pro x, which i will get into more detail later, but first let me give you more info on the mic  as i went ahead and got my own  after doing  more research on it .

Here are my findings.

PRODUCT FEATURES or HIGHLIGHTS

  • Clip-On Mic for iPhone and Android
  • Improved Sensitivity & Signal-to-Noise
  • Quality Recording to Your Smartphone
  • Use with Rode Rec App for Apple iOS

Original price:  $69 on amazon  – Check features 

Nerd specs

Sensitivity
-32.0dB re 1 Volt/Pascal (25.50mV @ 94 dB SPL) +/- 2 dB @ 1kHz

Frequency Range
20Hz – 20kHz

Dimensions
1180.00mmH x 4.50mmW x 4.50mmD

Weight
6.00gm

I got A RODE Smartlav Mic for smartphone for $39

samrtlav mic from ebay price

Yes$39 dollars AUD for a Brand  NEW Rode smartlav mic, but only because i got lucky  with ebay giving me $20 off on that day for any purchases over $50, so this was actually priced at $59 and I got it for $39.

There was one used one going for $36 on ebay which ended up at $46 after auction bidding and i missed that  and decided to buy full  price and got lucky.

Smartphone cameras are great, but their built-in microphones tend to have limited range and it can be difficult trying to place them properly for recording sound  due to the shape of the phone.

You also get  background noise competing with your dialogue or audio. However, if you regularly make videos where you need to hear people talking then you should consider investing in some external sound equipment like above

Another option in similar price range is The Olympus ME-51S Stereo Microphone

Olympus ME-51S Stereo Microphone for smartphone

Its range is not excellent so your subjects will need to be fairly close to your camera, but it does have better range than you would get using your inbuilt  phone’s microphone.

Get the rode smartlav from amazon over here

Get the Olympus mic from amazon over here

Final cut pro X  – Yes  as I told you earlier,  this software was used to stitch the audio  with video. I enquired how this was done.

And I got told that the 4k Camera i tested, itself records audio as well  but not so good , even though It was a 4k camera i had used . So what the director  software does is, it just imports the recorded audio from the rode mic onto the software  and the software has a function to sync the audio to video recognising the better recorded audio and you can stitch it together.

I watched the end result and was quite pleased with the whole video and my next buy obviously would not be the 4k camera, but the Final cut pro X video editing software instead.

Let me know if you have any experience with similar mic recording gadgets or software in the comments below.

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