Anyone Tried To Record A Concert?

[Defessus]

Quality Problems Recording Concerts?

Hey guys, first post here on the forums.

Having had the phone a couple of months now (bought it on launch day) I must say im pretty happy with it.

However with it's impressive technical specs I was hoping to be able to record concerts I go to. After going to roughly 3 of them now I have been underwhelmed with the quality of particularly the audio. The concerts have been primarily rock and I suppose the sound artifacting comes with the lower tones of the base drum/percussion sets. All the concerts have been within 3 rows of the stage located usually dead center.

The best recordings I seem to get are of course of acoustic numbers, but once a full band kicks in there is a lot of distortion. I dont expect the same quality of a 1000$ video recorder, but my Iphone friends seem to take 'listenable' bootlegs of gigs they go to without issue, or any kind of external mic (I wish something as simple as an external mic could fix this problem)

Any ideas on improving the audio quality with the video recorder, or similar experiences you guys have had? Are my Iphone friends privy to some magical audio input limiter app that isnt available on android? I will try and upload a video tonight just to show you guys an example. Specs for my phone are in my signature.

EDIT:

Here's a video i recorded, song is Fireflies by Owl City. Quality gets really poor once the chorus kicks in.

[video=youtube;OuW1YuYQuyc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuW1YuYQuyc[/video]

 

[Reks]

Hey guys, first post here on the forums.

Having had the phone a couple of months now (bought it on launch day) I must say im pretty happy with it.

However with it's impressive technical specs I was hoping to be able to record concerts I go to. After going to roughly 3 of them now I have been underwhelmed with the quality of particularly the audio. The concerts have been primarily rock and I suppose the sound artifacting comes with the lower tones of the base drum/percussion sets. All the concerts have been within 3 rows of the stage located usually dead center.

The best recordings I seem to get are of course of acoustic numbers, but once a full band kicks in there is a lot of distortion. I dont expect the same quality of a 1000$ video recorder, but my Iphone friends seem to take 'listenable' bootlegs of gigs they go to without issue, or any kind of external mic (I wish something as simple as an external mic could fix this problem)

Any ideas on improving the audio quality with the video recorder, or similar experiences you guys have had? Are my Iphone friends privy to some magical audio input limiter app that isnt available on android? I will try and upload a video tonight just to show you guys an example. Specs for my phone are in my signature.

EDIT:

Here's a video i recorded, song is Fireflies by Owl City. Quality gets really poor once the chorus kicks in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuW1YuYQuyc

I think I found your problem.

It's the other 5k+ people singing along.

Also video of iPhone recordings for comparison?

 

[Reks]

Here's a concert recording I found on the iPhone, it doesn't look like it does much better?

[video=youtube;vGidJGysaDI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGidJGysaDI[/video]

I'm thinking it has a lot to do with the venue and what type of sound they're putting out. If there's heavy bass there's bound to be distortions. What you can try to do is muffle the sound like a boom mic by putting a sock over it or something.

 

[ZeROSiGNAL]

Five Finger Death Punch

Most recent one I have tried to record was when I went to see Five Finger Death Punch at the House Of Blues in Anaheim...

Im actually impressed with the video quality of the DROID (except in low light situations, someone needs to fix that crap) and the audio came out... OKAY considering how close I was to the stage and speakers... here it is...

Five Finger Death Punch - Hard To See (1-21-10) Anaheim, CA House Of Blues

[video=youtube;jWhA5cF3S_g]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWhA5cF3S_g[/video]

 

[Defessus]

Hmm I've seen better Reks, but perhaps those are ones that my friends cherry-picked from the entire concert?

I just got back from another concert so i'll be sifting through the vids to see if anything is keepable.

Mainly I was just curious if there was anything I could do to improve sound, since after all there isnt much I can do about the 5k+ fans screaming behind me.

 

[Reks]

Hmm I've seen better, but perhaps those are ones that my friends cherry-picked from the entire concert?

I just got back from another concert so i'll be sifting through the vids to see if anything is keepable.

Mainly I was just curious if there was anything I could do to improve sound, since after all there isnt much I can do about the 5k+ fans screaming behind me.

Could try looking for apps that reduced mic sensitivity other than that I can't think of anything other than standing farther away from stage or reducing sensitivity externally.

 

[Defessus]

other than standing farther away from stage or reducing sensitivity externally.

Damn, who would have known there was a disadvantage to getting 2nd row tickets all the time.


I'll keep prowling the market for mic modifying apps in the meantime.

 

[Guchi]

the mic is just not going to do any better sorry but it is a phone mic. if you had a high grade mic you could record high quality audio

 

[Reks]

other than standing farther away from stage or reducing sensitivity externally.

Damn, who would have known there was a disadvantage to getting 2nd row tickets all the time.


I'll keep prowling the market for mic modifying apps in the meantime.

i'm tellin you man just stick one of these on there and you are good to go

 

[gentlefury]

I got an app for recording uncompressed audio and it worked great except there was no vu meter or gain adjustment, so when the crowd cheered or the band got loud it clipped It would be really easy for someone to make an audio recorder that had vol control and a vu so you could get a really nice recording....honestly when it wasn't clipping it sounded phenomenal!

 

[Defessus]

This seems promising.

The acoustic set from my concert tonight sounded pretty damn good, i'm uploading a test vid to youtube shorlty that i'll link.


The electric set sounded as I expected, HOWEVER:

I found that I could greatly improve the sound quality by simply manually lowering the sound in the VLC player i was playing it in on my computer. When i re encode the rest of these tomorrow, i'll be sure to manually edit the sound down (to around 30%) since it seems to be taking out a lot of the background noise by lowering it that much when playing back. (Usually I find it doesnt matter how much I lower the volume, it still is distorted so this is a nice discovery.)

 

[SwordOfWar]

This seems promising.

The acoustic set from my concert tonight sounded pretty damn good, i'm uploading a test vid to youtube shorlty that i'll link.


The electric set sounded as I expected, HOWEVER:

I found that I could greatly improve the sound quality by simply manually lowering the sound in the VLC player i was playing it in on my computer. When i re encode the rest of these tomorrow, i'll be sure to manually edit the sound down (to around 30%) since it seems to be taking out a lot of the background noise by lowering it that much when playing back. (Usually I find it doesnt matter how much I lower the volume, it still is distorted so this is a nice discovery.)

you could try changing the compression of the audio when recording high quality video. There is a post somewhere that mentioned editing a file to raise the bitrate of video (you could do the same for the audio setting, i suppose)... that might give you more of what you want.

You might have to bump your phone to 800MHz though, as raising those settings causes more stress on the phone. I noticed that changing the recording fps from 25 to 30 and increasing the bitrate from 3mbps to 6-8 cause the video to clip, stutter and cut out sometimes during the recording (you won't notice it until you try playing the recorded video).

Also, video recording in low light situations causes a lot of extra stress on the phone too, for some reason. It seems like bright environments record like a breeze, but it can struggle in low light situations.

Picture taking seems to suck in moderate to low light as well. That dual led flash will blind the hell out of you though, and it always makes me look like I have red eye.

Anyway, hope you get what your looking for. I personally thought sound quality was great and loud, but I never tried to record a musical show. Works great for personal videos with mostly just speech.

 

[Defessus]

you could try changing the compression of the audio when recording high quality video. There is a post somewhere that mentioned editing a file to raise the bitrate of video (you could do the same for the audio setting, i suppose)... that might give you more of what you want.

You might have to bump your phone to 800MHz though, as raising those settings causes more stress on the phone. I noticed that changing the recording fps from 25 to 30 and increasing the bitrate from 3mbps to 6-8 cause the video to clip, stutter and cut out sometimes during the recording (you won't notice it until you try playing the recorded video).

Also, video recording in low light situations causes a lot of extra stress on the phone too, for some reason. It seems like bright environments record like a breeze, but it can struggle in low light situations.

Picture taking seems to suck in moderate to low light as well. That dual led flash will blind the hell out of you though, and it always makes me look like I have red eye.

Anyway, hope you get what your looking for. I personally thought sound quality was great and loud, but I never tried to record a musical show. Works great for personal videos with mostly just speech.

Yeah im running at 800mhz right now with the ROM I have. I'll look for that file to edit, see if I can find a link on the forums somewhere.

PS: I also notice that after I upped the bit rate on the recording, I dont get smooth recordings anymore, I get a few jumps and stutters in each of the songs. (for the video portion)

 

[m3kilpat]

Last December I went to the Trans Siberian Orchestra show in Albany, NY. It was at the Times Union Center so the venue was large and I was on the left side of the stage towards the back. The music they play is loud, but the audio came out really really good when I took a video. The video itself...not so great as the camera doesn't like flashing lights, strobes, and lasers too much.

 

[Jimmeh]

I find it better when you get on the opposite side of whoever is playing bass and close enough to one of the speakers to not be directly in front of it. I love how well the Droid handles drums. Usually that is what I find hard to capture. I've recorded a few and I thought these one a turned out pretty good although I have more on my channel where the bass took over with distortion. I'm going to try that sock method out.

[video=youtube;VSG6idUpiCM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSG6idUpiCM[/video]

Warning... Language on the second one

[video=youtube;XxEc0XSNiGk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxEc0XSNiGk[/video]

You will probably have to adjust the quality on youtube.