Very low quality audio recordings

Yesterday i tried to record a video of a band playing loud live music. The audio of the recording was indeed of very bad quality and disappointing. I don’t know if it is a hardware issue. Hopefully it can be solved through an update.

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I suspect it has to do with recording low frequencies. The sound completely distorts. I like to use my phone recording audio from my band rehearsals but the phone doesn’t work in this scenario. Might be a microphone issue.

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In Eva Gouven posted a video message regarding the delay of some orders here: FP3: my order just got delayed by one month! from mid Sep. to mid Oct. to early Nov
One issue she mentions is a minor audio issue. Maybe that is related?

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Thanks for the example :wink: .

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It could be. I ordered mine from a retailer as I had lost my previous phone and couldn´t wait for the shipment from the website. The phones were obviously already shipped to the retailers before they spotted the problem with audio. Which means that anyone getting them from retailers during the time they are delaying shipment from the website will risk getting one with this defect.

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Same here.

FP3 is not “Cannibal Corps” proof! Recorded in Montreal this week-end.

Here is how it sounds with another phone

Something is wrong with my FP3 phone it seems.

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That is exactly how my recordings sound. :frowning_face:

Same issue with mine! It’s not Cannibal Corpse, Two other bands at a jazz festival sound the same…
Do you guys also have issues with call quality? My parents keep complaining of scratching noises and very sensitive microphone when I call them. I’m guessing the two issues are related?

Hi again. Have you tried removing the bumper? When I did, the audio during calls seemed to improve.

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Hey there,
I noticed a slight audio-issue a few days ago, when I recorded a short video.
Didn’t realy get to recheck, but might mention it anyways.

When recording videos in landscape mode and holding your FP3 one-handed, you might cover the mic-hole (the one next to USB-C) with your palm. This might cause some disturbance in the audio and I think that’s the reason my audio came out a bit fuzzy.

Will do some further tests the next few days.

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Anyway, you should also try a different camera application, since I noticed that the original camera application has enabled by default (and you can’t disable it as far as I know) a kind of noise filter that completely destroys the sound when recording music.

You can solve it in the Opencamera app by selecting “Unprocessed” under “Video settings” -> “Audio source”. Try it out! :wink:

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For me that’s really an issue. I usually use my phone a lot to record during music rehearsals. Cannot do that with the FP3 at all beacuse the recording quality is a desaster – terrible! The sound quality keeps pulsating throughout the entire recording, within just seconds it goes from crystal clear to completely dull and back and forth and ever so on.

And the app doesn’t matter: This happens when I record usinge Audio Recorder, any other recording app or even record a video including sound. There’s something really wrong about this and I wish it to be solved soon.

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Hi there !

I have a very (very) bad sound when I record videos with my fairphone 3, since I bought it, one month ago.

At first I thought the music I was recording was too loud (even though my last phone : LG4 please… very old, could record it very well)

But then I tried to record myself playing piano, and the result is still very very bad.

Do you think there will be any update that can correct that ?

Do you have the same issue ?

Should I change one of the component ?

It seems it’s working well for calls, because I never had any feedbacks from people I called.

Sorry for my english, I’m french

Greetings,

Gilles1

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Welcome to the community forum.

I moved your post here to avoid duplicate topics.
As for what to do …

A support contact form for the Fairphone 3 can currently be found here (just choose Fairphone 3 as your model) …

My experience is the same

I also do have issues with the call quality. Why is there no bug tracker for the FP3?

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Alarmed by this thread I just did my own experiments using “Audio Recorder” from FDroid.

The phone provides 3 audio sources, “Mic” “Unprocessed” and “Bluetooth”

Mic provides crystal clear audio if and only if the only sound audible is a single human voice (speaker in a silent room)

The mic audio source becomes unusable if there are ambient noises such as music. After a few seconds of recording the music, the audio quality heavily degrades, surpressing and amplifying random frequency ranges in a way that sounds “under water” almost as if several flanger effects were overlayed over each other.

It seems that the “Mic” source has a voice filter auto-enabled that behaves very badly if the audio source is not a single voice but music or anything else.

The “Unprocessed” audio source does not exhibit this behavior but has an extremely weak signal. To hear anything, I had to software amplify the signal by at least factor 4. At this soft gain factor there is a lot of of white noise audible.

Attempting to record from “Bluetooth” Audio source just reports “Source Disconnected”

What’s missing is a source with a hardware gain that doesn’t try to be too smart for its own good. “Unprocessed” has terrible signal to noise ratio due to lack of gain and “Mic” is unusable for anything but an isolated speaker.

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I made a video comparing the sound of a song with the default Camera app VS Open Camera (with different audio input settings):

Default audio is good when simply talking to the phone, but absolutly not when singing or playing music. But, as @corvuscorax pointed, “unprocessed” audio usually needs to amplify the gain to get a decent/normal audio level (I found that you can do it easily in Audiofix, but it would be really nice if you can choose the entry level or a kind of auto input level).

Maybe the good thing of the low audio signal in unprocessed is that maybe if you record live music events with this configuration, audio will be good and not distort (“clip”) the signal :thinking:

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awesome comparison video!!!

I’d like to add though that amplifying recordings from the “Unprocessed audio source” in post processing adds comparably lots of white noise to the signal. Audio would be better if the signal was hardware-amplified before recording, but without such a horrible voice filter.

Most phones add such a voice filter during audio calls, when the only relevant audio signal is that of the speaker holding the phone to his ear, while all ambient noises should be suppressed.

Anything else, including hands-free audio calls, video calls, video recordings, streaming, chat apps with video conference support (Wire,Telegram,Whatsapp,…) basically EVERYTHING else but old-school voice calls should not have this particular filter enabled.

This must be a driver misconfiguration in the Fairphone. Every other phone on the market instead has an “auto-gain” filter for that, which auto-adjusts hardware gain to prevent clipping and optimize signal-to-nois, but does not try to single out voice.

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