As a nonprofit officer I often need to attend many conferences and seminars using various software (google meet, MS Teams, Zoom, etc) and I don’t get to choose which software is being used unless I am hosting it.
I have been using a run-of-the-mill sound recorder within that AppVM to record the standard audio channel for private use when making summary notes from a conference, but that comes with the drawback of recording office background sounds from my own microphone even when my own audio is muted within the conference. I’m collecting sounds like my typing on the keyboard (taking notes, doorbell, dogs, etc) and other background noises that I would rather not have in that recording.
So my questions are:
How can I record only the sound channel coming from that specific AppVM conferencing application and not from the audio device passed into that AppVM through the webcam audio mic, yet still have my own audio passed through and recorded when I am not muted within that conference?
Is there an alternate audio channel available in Qubes to tap into a specific app, or the VM without the microphone?
If not, Is there an application that taps into the audio of an application to create such an audio channel?
Is there a sound recorder application that gives you options on what audio channel to record.
Is it necessary to play with the Qubes PulseAudio configuration to make this happen somehow?
thanks,
Steve Coleman
https://HDRI.org
41.1 million people in the US could have this disease and not even know it.
In the same AppVM you can record from “Monitor of …” channel, it will record whatever output this AppVM generates. If your favorite recording app does not allow you to select this, you can do it with pavucontrol after starting recording (go to recording tab, and select which stream this app records).
I’ve used this in the past, it records audio and video from your desktop. It can also do your mic, but you obviously wont want to do that. I then extract the audio from the video.
In the same AppVM you can record from “Monitor of …” channel,
This worked for recording applications running in the VM, so for listen-only situations this works much better.
But in Teams when I speak there is no audio at all of my own voice recorded unless I set the input back directly to the webcam input. It appears that Teams does not emit any audio at all locally from the camera audio, as it is probably trying to negate any feedback delay loop. So, there may be no logical way around this problem if I still need to speak during the meeting.
So I either record just what comes through the internet via the application, or I record my microphone with all my background noise including the sound coming from the speakers. There doesn’t appear to be a channel where the two are mixed within Teams. It seems like I need a push to talk button to switch audio settings on the fly or some kind of mixer that creates another stream by combining the two using compression on the mic to remove some background noise. I’ll have to see if there is a pulse channel mixer and experiment.
In fact the last meeting I gave using Teams I needed to put on a headset just to remove some feedback that others were hearing due to my speakers feeding back into the mic along with with the added background noise. That had never happened with the old Teams desktop app, as we now are forced to use the browser meeting app instead. I may just have to look into noise reduction methods for the mic, but that won’t fix some of the background noise problems such as my keyboard. There is a real downside to having a nice tactile keyboard, because even a high end headset will pick that up.
Fortunately when I am hosting the Teams meeting I can have Teams record the whole thing. I can’t do that if I am just a participant.