JamKazam offers a very rich set of recording features that you can use in JamKazam sessions, either alone or when playing with other musicians.
Making Recordings
To make a recording in JamKazam, click the gray Record button in the session toolbar (pictured below with arrow).
You now see the recording dialog box (pictured below with arrow). You have the option to record just audio, or audio + video if you want to make a video recording of your performance. Click the radio button of the type of recording you want to make. There is also a checkbox labeled "Include voice chat in recorded audio". You will almost always want to leave this unchecked. But if there is a musician (either you or someone else) using a chat mic (as opposed to a microphone set up as a full/normal audio input) in your session, and if you want to capture the audio from that musician's chat mic as part of the recording for some reason, then you would check this box.
If you choose to record both audio and video (pictured below with arrow), you can choose from one of three options for the video source for your recording:
- Record my webcam only - If you are recording video of only yourself performing, this is your best option, as it will record the video of you straight from your webcam.
- Record session video window - If you are recording a group performance with multiple musicians in your JamKazam session, this is your best option, as it will record the composite video of all the musicians as you have arranged in the JamKazam session video window.
- Record my computer desktop - You generally will not want to use this option. It records the video from your entire computer screen. This can be a good option to use if you are recording some kind of tutorial, and need to show what's going on in the apps on your computer desktop, synchronized with the audio from the JamKazam session.
When you are ready to start your recording, click the "Start Recording" button at the top of the recording dialog box (pictured above). When you click this button, the dialog updates to a minimal format, and the button changes to state to display "Stop Recording" (pictured below with arrow). When you finish your performance, click the Stop Recording button.
When you click the Stop Recording button, a save dialog box is displayed for your recording (pictured below). If desired, you can click the play button under the Preview Recording text label to listen to the recording and decide if you want to keep it. You can also grab the slider handle to move around quickly to different parts of the recording.
If you decide to keep the recording, enter/choose values for the recording name, description, and genre, and then choose if you want to make the recording public (check the Public Recording box) or keep the recording private (don't check that box). If you make the recording public, other JamKazam users can listen to the recording on the JamKazam Feed. To finish up, click the orange Save button in the bottom right corner of the dialog box (pictured below).
To check on the status of your recordings, click the small "File Manager" text link at the bottom center of the JamKazam app (pictured below with arrow).
A dialog box titled "Your Files" is displayed. You can see that the recording we just made/saved is at the top of the list of recordings, titled in yellow text "Jazz Guitar Test #1" (pictured below).
There are four audio files associated with this recording, as follows:
- Stream Mix - This is the streamed mix of all the audio tracks of all the musicians in the session. In other words, this is the instantly available version of the session mix, and it's the recording of what you heard while playing in the session, mixing together your own audio tracks with the streamed tracks of any other musicians in the session. This mix uses your personal mix settings (instructions for using personal mix here) to set the levels of each musician/track in the session in the recording.
- Track (David/Vocal) - In this recording (we ran through this example recording in this help article above), I had two audio tracks set up - one for my vocals and one for my electric guitar. The second audio file is labeled "Track" and displays my pic and a microphone. You can see in the screenshot below that this track is tagged as "Highest Quality", which means I have the version of this track recorded by the audio interface. If another musician were in my session, I would have a "Stream Quality" version of their track - i.e. the recording of the audio that was streamed to me during the performance. JamKazam will later automatically transfer the Highest Quality version of each other musician's track(s) from my session. You can also see that this track is tagged as "Pending Upload". Once I leave this session, my audio tracks will be uploaded to the JamKazam servers. More details on this in a moment.
- Track (David/Guitar) - This third file is the track for my electric guitar and is labeled as such.
- Mix - This will be the final master mix of the recording. This final mix (as opposed to the instantly available Stream Mix) waits until all the high-quality tracks from all musicians in the session have been uploaded to the JamKazam servers. Then our servers make this final mix, and download this final mix down to all musicians in the session.
An important note here. The high-quality audio tracks from your performance (i.e. what was recorded through your audio interface vs. what was streamed over the Internet) are not uploaded until: (a) you have left the JamKazam session - we do this to avoid stressing your network while you are in session; and (b) the JamKazam app is still open/running on your computer. So if you leave the session and shut down the JamKazam app quickly, your recorded tracks will not be uploaded to the JamKazam servers to allow the final mix to be created. If you want this recording feature to work, you'll need to leave the JamKazam app open for a couple of minutes while not in a session before you shut the app down.
Once my audio tracks have been uploaded to the JamKazam servers, all my tracks display in Uploaded status (pictured below with arrow), and the final Mix updates to Mixing status. When the final mix has finished processing, it will be downloaded along with the high-quality tracks from each musician to all of the musicians that performed in the session.
Using Recordings with Other Tools
If you want to use your recordings outside JamKazam - for example, in a DAW to remix and edit the audio - it's easy to do this. As described earlier in this help topic, click the small File Manager text link at the bottom center of the JamKazam app screen, and you will see the dialog box below. On any recording, click the yellow Export text link (pictured below with arrow).
JamKazam will pop open a window on your computer that lists the available audio files. The individual audio tracks, the stream mix, and the final mix files are available here (as described earlier in this help article) in .ogg file format. If you need the audio files in another audio file format, you can use a free online media file format converter like https://www.media.io/ to change the files to .mp3, .wav, etc. Then simply import the audio files into your favorite audio app, and edit from there.
Using Recordings in JamKazam Sessions
You can also easily use/re-use your recordings within JamKazam sessions. To do this, click the "Recording" option in the "Recorded Audio" section of the session screen (pictured below with arrow).
Then click the recording you want to open (pictured below with arrow).
The recording is opened into your JamKazam session. Continuing the example from earlier in this help article, there are three audio tracks from the recording we made - the mix of all the tracks (labeled "Jazz Guitar Test #1" below), and the individual vocal and electric guitar tracks from the recorded performance. You can hover your mouse over the volume icon for any of these tracks (pictured below with arrow) to make the entire mix louder or softer, to make an individual part/track like the electric guitar louder or softer.
Click the Play button in the player window (pictured below with arrow) to play/pause/resume the playback of the recording. You can also grab the slider handle to jump directly to any point in the recorded audio.
If you'd like to watch a video that covers this material in a little more depth, please click play on the video below.