iShowU Instant for Mac

Maybe you should made this Universal if you wanted me to buy it! The only Macs are really 3 year or older or the Mac vPro that will changed this 2022 Late Fall Event!

This app needs much more love! TL;DR: Works as as advertised but a bit challenging to get set up. The killer feature you won't find at this price anywhere else is the ability to record audio from an app and the user's microphone at the same time, while still playing back the app audio to the user. HOWEVER, it’s really hard to get this going. I think it took us about an hour of fiddling with audio input/output settings to get it going the way we wanted. Some suggestions back to the developer (and to help anyone else setting this up): 1.) The app doesn’t initially ask to record the screen so it isn’t until you go to make your first recording that you get the warning asking for permissions in System Preferences. That’s followed by an error from the app because no frames were received by the application to record. (The initial setup could be streamlined.) 2.) In the application preferences you’ll find the settings to record an application’s audio. You will need to install an additional driver to enable this feature. This should probably be part of an initial-setup-wizard combined with the item above. 3.) Audio routing is finicky. If you try to switch your sound output after the target app and iShowU have been launched, application sound recording is dropped, and/or monitoring of application sound recording is muted. In the end, this is what we did to get everything working (this after the app and additional driver have been installed and given the required security permissions): 1.) Launch the app we wanted to record, and make sure its audio was being output where it needed to be during recording (e.g., headphones, computer speaker, etc.). iShowU will automatically use this setting to determine where to send the monitoring audio when it’s recording and will automatically switch to its own output source when it starts recording. 2.) Reboot. 3.) Launch iShowU Instant. 4.) Launch target app to be recorded. No idea if the launch order was what fixed our final bugs but we did a LOT of rebooting and changing settings and this series of steps is the last thing we did. Once set up, it has worked PERFECTLY. We could now record audio from an application, while also recording voice from a microphone, AND monitoring the app audio through our headphones. It would be great if there was a way to record the audio on 2 separate channels but since they are merged you may needed to do several rounds of tests to get your audio mix right before you record. It’s well worth the money but definitely feels like it could use some work to smooth out the setup and configuration quirks. (We’re on an M1 Mac Mini running Big Sur.)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Great little program. For the base price, it does exactly what I need it to do (replacing Snapz Pro, which is dead).

iShowU Instant at first appears like a very nice piece of software, with a lot of capabilities and a slick user interface. But then you discover that ALL the interesting features require you to pay extra money to gain access to. And then you discover a really annoying bug, causing you to constantly loose audio on your computer (because the iShowU Audio Capture plugin is taking over your audio output). So between making my computer's audio practically unusable for a long time--until I figured out the cause, at which point I just had to constantly waste time going into my system preferences to correct it--and not really offering me any remarkable features, I'm going to stick with my old video capture system. It was good enough, and it's not crippled. If you don't mind paying for the software twice, and you don't mind it royally messing up your system, then you should take a look at it. Apart from those problems it appears to be magnificent, but those problems are deal-killers for me. I'm uninstalling it.