Audio Recording

Supposing you would like to use RecordMyDesktop to record your screen as well as capture the sound. For example, if you are following steps in this tutorial: “Screen recorder for Ubuntu”. It might work on your default Ubuntu audio system but not with JACK. For example, you would like to capture the screen recording of your Ardour sessions. Ardour is using JACK. So the only way to capture the sound is to enable JACK in RecordMyDesktop. If you do not know how to use JACK to capture the sound in RecordMyDesktop, follow these steps: (assuming you have JACK fully installed in your system, if not refer to this tutorial on installing jack for ardour.)

1.) Launch Ardour and open the session.
2.) Hit Play button. You should be able to listen to it. If not, then its a problem with JACK in Ardour not with RecordMyDesktop. If there is a music coming out from Ardour, proceed to the next step.
3.) Go to Applications – Sound&Video – gtkRecordMyDesktop.
4.) Make sure to check the checkbox beside “Sound Quality”.
5.) Select a appropriate window in your Ardour environment. You can do that by “Select Window”.
6.) Click “Advanced”.
7.) Go to Sound tab and check “Use Jack for audio capture”. Select “ardour: master/out 1” and “ardour: master/out 2”. You can do multiple selections by Control then clicking using your mouse. These ports are the output sound of your Ardour which will be used by RecordMyDesktop as sound input. See screenshot below:

8.) Now close the Advance menu by clicking “x”.
9.) Hit “Record” on “RecordMyDesktop” and then play Ardour. Before you can even hit the play button on Ardour. You will see an error:

Recording is finished. RecordMyDesktop has exited with status: 281
Description: Improper Window Specification


If you see this error, then you will not be able to continue to record the screen output of your Ardour with sound from JACK. So what are the possible causes of this problem?

Possible Cause #1: The Window you have selected is very large causing your RecordMyDesktop to crash because of insufficient memory and CPU resources. Take note that if JACK will be enabled, JACK consumes almost the entire RAM and CPU to get minimal latency and lag. So enabling both JACK and recording with a large window using RecordMyDeskop will possibly cause the screen capture to return that error.

Possible Solution#1: Try selecting a very small window and repeat the process above. For example , see the screenshot below:

Possible Cause#2: If the solution above will not work. Then mostly it has something to do with configurations in RecordMyDesktop. These configurations are the video and audio quality settings.

Possible Solution#2: Try the tweaks below:

a.) In RecordMyDesktop, change the video quality settings to 5. This is a very low quality video settings only appropriate for troubleshooting purposes. Low quality forces the program to use low system resources.

b.) Now do the same thing with Sound quality, change it around 10.

c.) Select a small window.

Possible Cause#3: The last possible cause is in the performance settings of RecordMyDesktop.

Possible Solution#3: To minimize CPU and memory usage, the following are recommended:

a.) Encode on the Fly= uncheck
b.) Zero compresion = check
c.) Quick subsampling= check
d.) Full shots at every frame= uncheck

If all attempts fail to correct this issue. This is most likely a bug in the RecordMyDeskop that relates to the JACK audio environment. Feel free to submit a bug report or join the discussion here. I have the tried all the possible solutions and none of them seems to work except if you turn off the audio (unchecking the box beside Sound quality) in RecordMyDesktop and the screen capture will be OK. It might work for you.