Audio Recording Source - System Audio Capture Support?

[ks-nss]

Hi, I'm new to Scriberr and am investigating whether Scriberr can capture system audio alongside microphone input.

I'm hoping to use Scriberr to record online meetings (specifically Slack/Teams calls) and then use audio diarization techniques to identify different speakers. Currently, I'm recording through my microphone, which picks up the audio from my speakers as the other participants speak.

I'm wondering if Scriberr has the ability to capture the system audio directly (the audio output from Slack/Teams) instead of relying on the microphone picking it up. This would significantly improve the audio quality and clarity for diarization.

I've searched through the existing issues and haven't found anything related to this.

Any information on whether this is possible (or planned) would be greatly appreciated! or if it's currently implemented then apologies for this post etc etc...

Thanks!

[rishikanthc]

@ks-nss unfortunately since Scriberr runs as a webapp this wouldn't be possible. The browser cannot access system audio for security reasons. This is a OS and browser level restriction. Only desktop apps can access system audio.
In the long term I may implement a desktop app to connect to the server but it's not finalized and even if I do decide to do it won't be anytime soon.

[rishikanthc]

@ks-nss there are several free apps that can do this. I believe for teams there's already a feature to record and save meeting audio. Not sure about slack. But there are third party applications that can do this for sure. This might be the only workaround for this. You could use one of the apps to save the audio and then upload it to Scriberr for transcription

[rishikanthc]

One thing I can consider is to build a small desktop helper app to record system audio and upload to Scriberr automatically. I can consider this if there's sufficient community interest for this feature.

[ks-nss]

Thanks for the detailed replies. Are you sure it's not possible I have a feeling I have seen this before in another app but it might have been a desktop app as you suggested.

Not sure if the following is just for Firefox but it does seem there's a way to capture system audio in this link, but I am not a programmer.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capture_API/Using_Screen_Capture#capturing_shared_audio

[rishikanthc]

Interesting. Let me look into this more. I'm not an expert in web services or JS xD so pardon me if I got it wrong.
I'll definitely look into this. If this is possible it would be a great feature.

[DPBattaglia]

I'm interested in this

[rishikanthc]

So I did some digging and turns out this is possible.. But it is nuanced.. I'm currently using the getUserMedia API for getting microphone audio.. for capturing system audio, i need to use Screen capture api.. this means, the user will have to allow share screen and via that capture the audio.. this seems quite tricky as I'm not sure how it would behave if some other app is already sharing screen.. for eg. you might be on a zoom meeting sharing your screen.. so I don't know what the behavior would be if you try to request screen share using scriberr..
There's also the issue of handling both microphone and system audio streams.. they need to be mixed together or handled separately and later merged manually.. There's also the issue with echo loops if you are playing audio via the speaker and using microphone as well as in that case, it will be recording that sound twice..
So this won't be an easy implementation.. I'll try to work on this but this is going to be more long term as I don't have expertise in this..
As usual happy to accept community contributions if anyone knows how to do this correctly..