It’s been too long since I last was able to play Pokémon Platinum, mainly because I’m at one of those “notable battle” points, and want to record it for adding into the playthroughs. Anyway more to the point, my new tactic for recording near-perfect sound quality isn’t working out all too well…

So, what exactly is the problem? Well, the sound records fine, thanks to a very convenient male to male cable that goes from my DS’ headphone port to my computer’s microphone port. Both Windows Movie Maker and Audacity record the audio perfectly fine (although WMM at least allows the DS to play full blast, Audacity only likes half volume…).

The video, as always, is recorded fine with my very delicate setup of camera on bits of LEGO designed to hold it in the right place for recording. Everything imports and saves fine. Everything plays perfectly fine. The only big issue is that nothing seems to want to be in sync…

I add both the movie clip and the audio track to Movie Maker, sync up the start of them, and then play through to check it out. Seems fine, but eventually a noticeable delay builds up between the video and the audio. By the end of the 6 minute video, the audio is off by about two seconds at most. I tried this process twice, once recording using Movie Maker’s Narration function, and once using Audacity. Both were out of sync, with the Audacity recording going out of sync quicker!

That’s exactly what I don’t get. How can the audio and the video be out of sync, when both were recorded simultaneously as they were being played out on my DS? Why is there a very noticeable delay between them? Am I destined to have shitty audio quality, and possibly have to remain a patient person until an emulator comes out that can support sound, behave properly with transparency, and be able to self-record itself?

I have both sets of files on me, as well as the completed fail video of the first set, if anyone wants to try it out for themselves… I’m not uploading them for public downloading, as they’re around half a gig each… I might upload the fail vid to YouTube so you can see/hear for yourselves, if it will ever stop saying there’s an unknown issue with the file…