By: Nick Gambino
The iPhone is a highly advanced technological device that is capable of things that our ancestors would regard as miracles. But for all of its technical wonders, there’s one thing it has been unable to do for the last 17 years – record video without interrupting your music.
If you were listening to music on Spotify or Apple Music and wanted to capture a video, as soon as you fired up the video function in your camera, the music would come to a dead stop. This was especially frustrating when the music would have been the perfect soundtrack to the video you wanted to record.
Ok, there was technically a workaround that would allow you to record video without disrupting your audio. I discovered, by accident, that if you record video by long-pressing the capture button when in “Photo” mode, your music wouldn’t stop. The feature is known as QuickTake. This technically would record lower-res videos, but it worked for my purposes.
But now all you have to do is simply update your phone to iOS 18. The new iPhone operating system has finally “fixed” this problem with a real solution. Here’s what you need to do to take advantage of the new feature.
Go to “Settings” in your iPhone. Then go to “Camera.” Hit “Record Sound.” Now all you have to do is switch “Allow Audio Playback” to on. This will make it so your music or podcast or whatever audio is playing on your phone continues while you’re recording video.
Your reasons for keeping it going may vary. If you’re looking to have that audio work as a soundtrack for your video you should be aware of a few things:
- If the audio is playing through your iPhone speaker it will record in Mono.
- If it’s playing through a Bluetooth speaker or other hookup it will record in Stereo.
- If it’s playing through headphones, the audio won’t be captured at all.
- If you just don’t like the idea of interrupting your audio and don’t care if it’s heard in your video, disregard all of the above.
Of course there may be situations where you don’t want your audio to continue playing. In that case, you can toggle “Allow Audio Playback” to off in Settings or simply pause the audio while you record. I prefer to have it switched on by default, but everyone is different.
iOS 18 is available now.
