First off, I own a Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE smartphone. I have to admit that this phone is a bit clumsy when it comes to external microphones. My Telesin shotgun mic does weird things but at the end of the day, I was able to make it work.
Ulanzi J12 on the other hand has chosen a different path instead so to speak. You see, Ulanzi J12 works perfectly with the default voice recorder right off the bat. Xiaomi 11 is able to capture the audio coming from the wireless microphone without any glitch. Its noise cancellation works flawlessly and I love it! The only problem is that I’ve specifically bought this wireless microphone not for audio recording but for video recording and sad to say it failed on me horribly.
For some reason Xiaomi 11’s MIUI 13.0.4 default camera doesn’t seem to recognize that Ulanzi J12 has just been inserted into its USB port. But like I said, the same microphone works perfectly with its default audio recorder app, which means that the camera app needs some updating.
There is a workaround though and that is by installing the Open Camera app from the Google Play Store. What I did was just change the audio source to an external mic, and the app was able to recognize Ulanzi J12 and use it subsequently. The only problem with this setup is that the Open Camera app is not able to use the stabilization feature of Xiaomi 11 which means if I keep moving the footage becomes too shaky and nauseating.
Where will this lead? I think I’m back to square one. When I’m out and about like nature vlogging, I’ll be using my Telesin shotgun mic to capture sound, and if I just sit and talk or do something that doesn’t require any huge camera movements, I’d use the Ulanzi J12.
Again, this is from my own personal experience with Ulanzi J12. It does work perfectly on many smartphone models out there, but if you own Xiaomi, think hard or you’ll be better off finding another brand unless installing another app like Open Camera app is not an issue to you.