Firstly there is a place now where you can look at all the apps that are backed up.
More often than not, after waiting for an hour or so and nothing happens, you just curse under your breath and proceed to install your favorites apps manually via the Play Store.īut I just looked again recently and was pleasantly surprised that things are much more civilized now. Typically all the stars have to be aligned just right for this to happen. And when you setup a new phone with your Google account, you just have to wait and pray that your favorite apps will be restored to the phone. There isn't a place where you can see what has been backed up. But AppBrain had been going down the tubes, and Fast Web Install had always been a hit-and-miss affair.Īndroid's own "backup to the cloud" system had previously been even more unusable.
I used to use AppBrain/Fast Web Install to keep track of which apps I have installed on my phone, and to make it easier to reinstall those apps when the phone gets wiped or replaced. Luckily, for the Conexant sound card on my laptop, the procedure to enable the stereo mixer feature was comparatively straightforward.įirst, right-click on the "Sound" icon in the system tray and select "Recording devices": The procedure is frequently complicated and is different for various soundcard chipset families. Unfortunately, to enable the "Stereo Mixer" feature is not as simple as ticking a checkbox.
So after much Googling around, I found out that for most sound cards, the hardware feature is still there, just not enabled on the software side. Then under pressure from various organizations on the dark side of the force, Microsoft and soundcard makers starting disabling this wonderful feature from Windows Vista onwards. This allowed you to capture whatever was played to the speaker in all its digital glory. The video capture worked brilliantly, but to do a sound capture, I needed to do some hacking.Īpparently, there was this recording device called "Stereo Mixer" that was pretty standard in the Windows XP days.
I was playing with CamStudio to do a video capture of a Flash-based cartoon so that I can put it on the WDTV media player and play it on the big screen in the living room for my kids. This procedure worked for my laptop (Thinkpad E530) with a Conexant 20671 sound card, but I suspect it will work for other sound cards in the Conexant family.