Lily Katz/Android Authority
long story short
- Code in the Hey Melody app points to the new “Headphone Recording” feature. OnePlus and OPPO use the Hey Melody app to manage the headset’s settings.
- The “Headphone Recording” feature allows you to use the microphone in your headphones to record sound while shooting video. The feature can also have clear mode and immersive mode settings.
- This feature is currently under development and is not available.
OnePlus makes some great phones, but it also makes some great headphones. The OnePlus Buds Pro 2 and OnePlus Buds 3 have been received very well, with the latter receiving more specific praise for its value proposition. The company seems to be hoping to make its headphones even more useful in the future, as we discovered a new feature that lets you capture audio through the headphones during video recording.
one APK teardown Help predict future features that may appear on the service based on ongoing code. However, such predicted functionality may not be publicly released.
OnePlus (and more broadly, OPPO) comes with the Hey Melody app that lets you manage OnePlus and OPPO earbuds on non-OnePlus and OPPO smartphones. The app enables you to handle all the settings that the earbuds allow you to customize without locking you into your OnePlus/OPPO smartphone. We spotted new strings in the Hey Melody v114.3, which gives us a good look at what the company is doing with its future headphones.
code
<string name="melody_common_headset_shoot_earphone_record_hd_mode_summary">High-definition recording. Authentically reproduces surrounding sounds.</string>
<string name="melody_common_headset_shoot_earphone_record_hd_mode_title">Clear mode</string>
<string name="melody_common_headset_shoot_earphone_record_immersive_mode_summary">Multi-channel surround effect. Provides a rich and immersive audio experience.</string>
<string name="melody_common_headset_shoot_earphone_record_immersive_mode_title">Immersive mode</string>
<string name="melody_common_headset_shoot_earphone_record_summary">Record sounds with the microphones in your headphones while shooting a video.</string>
<string name="melody_common_headset_shoot_earphone_record_title">Headphone recording</string>
<string name="melody_common_headset_shoot_record">Recording</string>From these strings we can tell that OnePlus is working on a new feature called “Headphone Recording”. This feature allows you to use the microphone in the OnePlus (and OPPO) earbuds to record sound while recording video. This may bypass the phone microphone normally used when recording video.
This feature will be further complemented by “Clarity Mode” and “Immersion Mode”. Clarity mode will “authentically reproduce surrounding sounds” with “high-definition recording,” while Immersive mode will provide a “rich and immersive audio experience” with “multi-channel surround effects.” We don’t know the difference between the two modes (other than one explicitly focused on stereo recording), so we’ll have to wait for OnePlus to roll out the feature.
This feature is still under development. We’ve tried the new version of Hey Melody on the OnePlus Buds Pro 2 and OnePlus Buds 3, and with the OnePlus 12 and Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, but we couldn’t get the feature combination to show up in any of the phone’s earbuds.
We don’t know if and when OnePlus will release this feature, but it does sound like a nice feature to have on the earbuds. Some phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, allow you to use Bluetooth (and by extension Bluetooth earbuds) as the audio recording source while recording video in Pro mode. We think this new feature will allow you to use your headphones as a voice recorder on more devices, without the need for manual camera mode.
There is a possibility that this feature will be limited to OnePlus and OPPO smartphones, so we will have to wait and see exactly how OnePlus implements this feature.