OnePlus is working on a new ‘Headphone recording’ feature for its earbuds (APK teardown)

Lily Katz / Android Authority

OnePlus makes some good phones, but it also makes some good earbuds. The OnePlus Buds Pro 2 and the OnePlus Buds 3 have been received quite well, with the latter being praised more specifically for its value proposition. It seems the company wants to make its earbuds more useful in the future, as we’ve spotted a new feature that would allow you to shoot audio during a video recording through your earbuds.

An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.

OnePlus (and, more broadly, OPPO) ships the Hey Melody app that lets you manage OnePlus and OPPO earbuds on non-OnePlus and OPPO smartphones. This app enables you to handle all the settings your earbuds allow you to customize without locking you into OnePlus/OPPO smartphones. We’ve spotted new strings within Hey Melody v114.3, giving us a good idea of what the company is working on for its future earbuds.

High-definition recording. Authentically reproduces surrounding sounds.  Clear mode  Multi-channel surround effect. Provides a rich and immersive audio experience.  Immersive mode  Record sounds with the microphones in your headphones while shooting a video.  Headphone recording  Recording

As we can see from these strings, OnePlus is working on a new feature called “Headphone recording.” This feature will let you record sounds with the microphones in your OnePlus (and OPPO) earbuds while video recording. This will presumably bypass the phone’s microphone which is usually used when recording a video.

The feature would be further complemented by a “clear mode” and an “immersive mode.” Clear mode will “authentically reproduce surrounding sounds” with “high-definition recording,” while immersive mode will provide a “rich and immersive audio experience” with a “multi-channel surround effect.” It’s not immediately clear to us the difference between the two modes (other than one being expressly focused on stereo recording), so we will have to wait for OnePlus to roll out the feature.

This feature is currently still in development. We’ve tried out the new version of Hey Melody with the OnePlus Buds Pro 2 and the OnePlus Buds 3, paired with the OnePlus 12 and the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and we could not get the feature to show up in any phone-earbud combination.

We don’t know if and when OnePlus will release this feature, but it does sound like a nice feature to have on earbuds. Some phones, like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, allow you to use Bluetooth (and, by extension, Bluetooth earbuds) as an audio recording source when recording video in Pro mode. We presume this new feature will allow you to use the earbuds as a recorder across more devices without needing a manual camera mode.

There is a chance that this feature could be restricted to OnePlus and OPPO smartphones, so we’ll have to wait to see how exactly OnePlus implements this feature.

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