Sound Recording Overview
Screen Movie Studio allows you to add sound to your movies by selecting this option. You can add narration, music, step-by-step instructions, or nearly any sound at all. You can use sound as critical direction, emphasis, or simply as a background. Screen Movie Studio will record your voice input from the microphone while it is capturing video You need a sound card to use this option.
Device:
You need at least one Sound Card installed on your computer to record sound. Perhaps you've installed more than one Sound Card on your system, you can choose one as the device for sound recording.
Audio Source:
Microphone is the most common audio source, but you can record sound from other audio source too. Which audio source is selected for sound recording is determined by your system settings, to change this: right click the volume control icon in the lower-right corner (the system tray) and select the Open Volume Control menu, this will open the volume control program. You can also run the program directly, the file's name is "SndVol32.exe". Open the "properties" menu and check "recording", then press the OK button. A dialog will appear for you to set audio source and volume. You can select one of the audio source:
Microphone is for recording from a microphone. You must have a microphone attached to your sound card.
Line in is for recording from album or cassette. Line-in refers to the external source from which you intend to record. An example would be recording from an external source such an album or cassette deck. You should choose Line-in to record from the line-in source on the sound card. Connecting a line-in device to your PC To connect a record player or cassette player to your PC, you need to take the audio output of the desired device and connect it to your Line-in input on your sound card To connect a device to your PC, you need the necessary cable (Left and Right RCA to 1/8-inch stereo RCA).
Mono Out, Wave Out Mix is for recording from more than one input, like an actual mixer. You can use this audio source to record sound from other application for example sound from Windows Media Player, if your sound card support this feature.
Record Format:
The sound data recorded from your sound card is PCM format (uncompressed). Screen Movie Studio can compress it into another format using some audio codec installed on your system. Because a compress format can accept only a specific PCM format audio data as input, so the record format is determined by compress format. Screen Movie Studio will choose a PCM format as the record format automatically according to the compress format you specified.
Compress Audio Data:
The audio data in an AVI file can be formatted and compressed in a variety of ways. Compressing a movie file is also called encoding so either word may be used indiscriminately.
The process of compressing, encoding, decompressing or decoding is done by means of a component called a audio CODEC (COmpress/DECompress Driver). The codec must be installed on both the computer that compresses the file and on any computer that wants to decompress and play the audio stream. You can let Screen Movie Studio compress audio using some codec installed on your system.