Part 2: How to do a Let’s Play

If you remember back just less than a year ago, I wrote an article called Part 1: How to do a Let’s Play. Well today is the second part and this one goes into the software side of things. As before I am going to go over a range of prices. This article also assumes you want to do live voice recording and not recording afterwards but the same counts for those that do – you will just need to step a bit.

To find out the prices just open the link below in a new window and you will find them right away.

Software

Editing / Recording

The first bit of software you are going to need is what I am going to call the editing / recording software. I am sure I do not need to tell you why this is vital but basically without this no matter how good you are, you are not going to record anything.

The software package I would recommend you to do purely based on how well it has worked for me is Movie Edit Professional from Magix. Magix allows you to first record your footage as you would expect and then allow you if needed to edit the footage such as cleaning the audio, cutting parts out. Magix also will allow you to export the footage into ideal formats for video uploading sites.

Should Magix not be your thing or your budget does not allow you to get new software, the next one is the Roxio Game Capture Software. If you got the Roxio Game Capture from the link in part 1 then you already have filming and editing software that is far more simple (but less powerful) to use than Magix.

The Roxio will allow you to as you expect record game play and then do basic editing and then exporting it into a format for online video sharing websites.

And the last one I am going to list is a free solution and that is AVS Video Editor. While this editor is basic it will allow you to record from an external source and do video editing.

Audio Mixing

Audio mixing is the hardest one that I spent ages researching originally for Playing Games with Snat. Lucky enough there is a few solutions (now assuming you are using Windows, if using Linux you are lucky enough to use Pulse Audio) that you need to pay for and one solution that is free.

The first solution is stereo mix within Windows and this is a free solution that “possibly” is built into your operating system drivers. This method basically allows everything that can be heard on your computer to be recorded which means you can have software that is playing back your microphone and the game capture.

A big problem with this solution is it might not be on your system as it was removed to stop people from recording music (although a simple 3.5 to 3.5 cable can do that) and that it does not sound the best. If you can avoid this one, avoid it.

The next one is the original software I got and that is Virtual Sound Card from e2esoft. This one works pretty well and will directly merge the audio without any hassle but it comes with a problem – you can not control the volume level of any of the audio sources which means you can not lower the game audio so your microphone can be heard.

The next one however is the one I will recommend you to get, although cost the most of the lot and that is Virtual Audio Stream from DDMF. This works by allowing you to merge different channels together and that is it. You are able to use Windows volume controller to record how loud everything records at thus you can turn down the game capture and increase your microphone.

Furthermore this software is not hard to set up but seeing I have already done it there is a screenshot below showing how I use it.

And there we have it. In the first part you learned about the hardware you will need and now in this part you have learnt about what software you will need. The next article will go into how I do a let’s play and give further advise. Beyond that however you should now have the knowledge to get started.