Dateline 7-30-2016

So far my history with learning to build Android apps goes like this. I take a lesson, writing the code along with the instructor, we get to the end of the lesson and I run my app to test it only to find that it doesn't work 50% of the time. Then I go back through the code to find that I missed one comma or didn't capitalize one letter, leading to the fatal crash. I finish off by making the change and everything ends up works perfectly.

I spent the last three days working on a twenty part tutorial on how to build a fancy video recording app to meet the need of my latest personal project. This time, I was nailing it, after each lesson, I would test the app and it worked perfectly every time. Even when I would go two or three lessons without testing, because I was writing background code that can't be seen, I would nervously press the play button and find that I successful duplicated the build.

This long streak of success built my confidence and I was excited to get to the end of the playlist to get back to work on my project. Then, last night, I got to my final lesson everything was going smoothly and all that was left was to add the ability to record sound along with the video.

This sounded like it should have been a simple wrap-up lesson. All I had to do was activate the microphone and set it to run when you hit record and it was just that simple. I finished the lesson and hit the play button, still half expecting a crash but no crash came. The app continued to work perfectly until I went to play the video back.

Upon playback, the sound played to a blank screen. Again, I thought this would be a quick fix and that I must have just tweaked something in the image record code in the process of adding sound but as soon as the audio played out the video started to play.

So both the sound and the video are being recorded at the same time but they're not being synced up in playback for some reason. I downloaded the instructor's code only to get the same results. Luckily that means I did good, but unfortunately, that means it must be an issue how my phone reads the code which I'm sure won't be that hard to fix but I don't even know how to search for a solution because I don't know how to word the issue without getting tons of irrelevant results.

So, that's what I'll be up to today. I'll be sure to let you know how it turns out.

Talk to you tomorrow,

- The Wicker Breaker