The external mic I bought is not working on my camera or phone. This is a question that can have many different answers and variables with so many affordable microphones in todays market. This post addresses some simple microphone and audio problems that I have seen and experienced many times. This is aimed at people using small self powered plug in microphones with 3.5mm audio cables (typical headphone jack size) in to something like a phone, tablet, DSLR or Mirrorless camera.

Why use an external microphone?

Internal microphone audio on cameras and phones can be great in quiet indoor situations, but as soon as you get outside in noisy environments you will notice that the quality starts to deteriorate. The nature of the internal mic allows wind to whistle through the holes and create some quite harsh noise. An external mic is built to handle these conditions, often they come with a wind shield and a shock mount to avoid picking up unwanted movement sound.

Using an external microphone is a quick and easy way to get better sounding audio with only the effort of plugging in a cable and pointing the microphone in the right direction. But more and more people are falling in to issues with external microphones and these can be easily avoided.

Why is this a problem now?

This never really used to be a problem because previously the main two types of 3.5mm cable people tend to have available were TS and TRS jack cables. TS is a mono 3.5mm lead and TRS is a stereo 3.5mm lead. Both of these tend to be interchangeable, the only difference being that one is mono (records on one channel, left or right) and the other stereo (records on the left and right channel). So the worst that happens is you record it in mono and have to copy the track across to the other channel in the edit to create a stereo effect, no dramas there either way.

Most microphones in the low end market used to have the cables as part of the microphone, so you could never plug in the wrong type of audio cable. It also meant that you couldn’t plug in a really long or poor quality cable as this can also lead to problems when recording.

A lot of modern microphones have fully detachable audio cables now, so inevitably there are some people having problems here. The introduction of the TRRS audio cable standard (see below) has created some headaches and confusion to something that should be a really simple set up.

Types of problem

No sound when recording

Now if you are trying to just plug a microphone into your tablet or smartphone, it isn’t working and you get no sound then this will be due to you not using a TRRS cable. You need to make sure that the TRS end (2 rings) is plugged into the microphone and the TRRS end (3 rings) is plugged into the recording device. If your cable does not have a TRRS end with 3 rings then you can buy these cables cheaply from most retailers.