How to record via audio cable directly to a phone rec app?

[digisus]

Sorry for a very non-pro question in here.

I struggle with what I thought is a very straight-forward thing. I want to use a male/male 3.5mm audio cable to connect my phone and - using a recording app on the phone - record the playing via cable. I seems not work no matter what I try. I have monitors connected that alsoo offer 3.5mm sockets (for headset and aux). I do not understand why no signal arrives on the phone directly. Actually, it continues to use the built-in microphone as input - and of course you can hear the clacks of pressing the keys while playing. What am I missing here?

Thanks a lot!
digisus

[Schorsch]

Hi,

phones usually have an audio output connection, not a standard audio input. That means that you can connect a phone to an amplifier and speakers to play music etc. from the phone, but you cannot feed any audio signal into the phone to be recorded, recording is usually done from the build-in microphone as you also noticed.

I am not aware of any phone that provides an audio input socket - which phone do you use?

[FZiegler]

If you really use a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm connection, you also plugged the cable in the wrong plug: The only 3.5mm socket on any Nord is audio-in, not out. And any 3.5mm socket on a smartphone is audio-out (headphone connection), not audio-in.

So, probably, with your cable you can direct play-along music from the smartphone to the piano or add a click from a metronome app. But not record.

[Mr_-G-]

There must be a (mono?) audio input in mobile phones, otherwise those ear buds that come WITH a microphone and a TRRS plug would not work...

[Nordlicht]

It's possible but not that easy.

You need a suitable adapter (e.g. Lightning to USB in case of an iPhone) + any audio interface (the cheapest 20 EUR Behringer interface like UCA222 works). I am doing this often to quickly record videos while playing. Video is coming from the iPhone camera (obviously) and the sound via the interface.

[Schorsch]

There must be a (mono?) audio input in mobile phones, otherwise those ear buds that come WITH a microphone and a TRRS plug would not work...

You‘re right, I should have said „standard audio input socket“ - corrected in my previous post

[sofiaLine]

I had a very similar situation when I first started streaming, although at the time I did not immediately realize that something was wrong with my microphone setup. The audio was not perfect, but it was not bad enough to clearly point to a technical issue, so I assumed everything was working more or less as expected.

Part of the reason was the type of content I was creating. I was testing online casino games and bonus features from the games listed on https://somagyarkaszinok.com/befizetes-nelkuli-bonusz/. Most viewers were mainly interested in the gambling gameplay itself, watching how the slots behaved and how the bonus rounds played out. The in game sound was clean and consistent, and since the audience focus was on the game mechanics rather than my commentary, the quality of my voice did not seem like a top priority at first.

Still, something about the sound always felt wrong. It was very roomy, with noticeable background noise and keyboard clicks. I was convinced the issue had to be my hardware. I was using a Shure SM58 connected via an XLR cable to a basic USB audio interface and then into my laptop. I checked the cables several times and even swapped the mic cable, but nothing improved.

In the end, the problem was not the microphone or the cable at all. It turned out that OBS and the operating system were actually using the built in microphone of the laptop the whole time instead of the USB audio interface. That explained why the sound never changed no matter what I adjusted on the hardware side. The external microphone and cable were working perfectly, they were just never selected as the active input source.

Everything started working properly only after I manually selected the USB audio interface as the audio input both in the system settings and inside OBS. The difference was immediate. My voice became clean, clear, and consistent. Since then, I always double check which audio input is actually being used, especially in situations where voice quality does not seem critical at first, because if the system does not clearly detect a valid external input, it will often fall back to the built in microphone.