Gadgetory

hey I'm Donnell bail for cnet.com and I've been playing with the new Instagram in Instagram videos for about a week now and I have to admit I kind of missed the old Instagram you'll fly it Instagram there's nothing against videos here I just don't like all the audio and hiss and unintentional dialogue that comes with them so got to thinking how hard would it be to record silent Instagram videos and it turns out is harder than you'd think there's no built-in mute button in Instagram there's no way to actually mute the hardware for your iPhone or for an Android phone so how do you do it well you could try covering up the microphone with your finger or plugging in a headset and covering up the microphone on the headset but the best-case scenario there you're gonna get some muffled audio you're still gonna get some audio worst case you're gonna get some distortion from your finger rubbing on the microphone then I thought what if you got a pair of cheap headphones with the microphone built-in that kind of that have the special three-banded mini jack on the end you could just snip the cable and eliminate the microphone right well it turns out that worked at least it worked on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 when I plugged in the headphone jack it was enough to override the internal microphone and just having that little nub plugged in at the top allowed me to record video silently unfortunately on my iPhone the iPhone needs to be able to detect a very specific electrical resistance in the cable in order for it to work properly and cutting the cable in half defeats that so I gave up on headphones and I tried another adapter I had at my desk this thing is called iRig it's a little adapter that allows you to plug in your guitar or any kind of line instrument cable into your iPhone and be able to do recordings you can find these or adapters like these for around 10 to 20 dollars and when you plug it in it has the miraculous effect of overriding your iPhones microphone leaving it mute so long as you don't plug your guitar into here now I know it's not pretty but it's a workable solution you can take around with you if you're serious about this whole silent video thing another cool thing about using this is that you have an external input here that you could run an audio source into and record that into your Instagram videos so if you wanted to have Guns and Roses be the soundtrack of all of your Instagram videos you could do that with this adapter although I suspect the lawsuit you get from Axl Rose might not be worth the effort so there you go that's how to make silent Instagram videos the hard way now if you've got a better tip for doing this let me know over how-to cnet.com and if you're an Instagram or Facebook employee please make this video obsolete by adding a microphone mute button to your app I'm Donald Bell see you next time