I love the ability to record animated gifs from the simulator. However I wonder how to record sound as well?
A feature similar to the gif output but as a video with sound would be ideal, but I have no idea how difficult of an ask this is.
Alternatively, if someone figured a good way to to do that on Mac without spending too much on software, I’d love to know. I don’t think that the screen recording picks up sound on mac. so maybe using something like Soundflower to rout the audio to QuickTime recording? Seems complicated.
Maybe OBS could be an option?
This would be great! I've done it by recording from the actual hardware using Playdate Mirror—which records a video with sound—but Mirror can noticeably harm performance. It would be nice sometimes (and for devs whose Playdate has not arrived yet) to instead record the Simulator. I've artificially slowed my game to approximate hardware when run in the Simulator, so that would be a pretty good result.
Meanwhile, I do remember using Soundflower in ages past: when you do a Mac screen recording, you can choose your mic, and that gets shown as a choice, IIRC.
Also, if you don't mind losing some (possibly a LOT) of audio quality—and only getting mono—you can do a screen recording with the Mac's mic LISTENING to its own speakers. I did that recently to stream from Playdate Simulator on Twitch. My game's soundtrack was lo-fi enough that it was... passable. But not great. Suggestion: toss some fabric around to make a less-echoey environment around the Mac.
Yes, Rogue Amoeba's ACE is used by Twitch as well. (I declined to install it for now since it requires jumping through some hoops to enter a reduced security mode on the Mac that allows kernel extensions. I do trust Rogue Amoeba's intentions—they've been Mac audio standbys for ages—and I get the reasons for it. But for me, if I'm going to take a step like that, and be exposed to potential extension bugs too, I have to REALLY want it. So far I haven't wanted it enough. But… if the Simulator could record its own audio it would dodge that necessity )
Yes Loopback seems like a decent option, but 99$ is more than I wanted to spend to just record a couple of clips, and the vulnerabilities concern me.
I may have to go down that route still. Very strange that there isn’t a free straightforward way to do this in 2023.
I checked OBS and people mention Blackhole, which seems to be doing what loopback does but for free. If someone has used this I’d be interested to know how it went.
Thank you for all the answers.
Oh boy that’s way too complicated. And if you couldn’t make it work with the Simulator then it’s pointless. Loopback looks like it then. Thank you for all the information.
So twitch with OBS? I’m confused. When I was streaming, Twitch needed a streaming software like OBS. but on forums they say that OBS won’t record sound on mac without something like Blackhole.
Twitch have their own recording app: Twitch Studio, which includes ACE to intercept/record app audio the same way as Loopback. https://www.twitch.tv/broadcast/studio
Twitch Studio itself installed (well, until I declined the last step) ACE on Mac—nothing more needed.
And it looks like you CAN save a local video file with Twitch Studio... It seems you must be streaming to do it, but so what? One or two people might pop in and back out, no harm done.
I customized Twitch Studio to show just the Playdate screen with no other overlays. The Help for new users is pretty good.
So yes Twitch Studio technically “works” but it’s so choppy and blurry on my 2017 MacBook Pro than it’s unusable. I’ll have to migrate the operation to the PC or something.
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