When checking microphone SoundEvents there is no way to "stop listening"

[microbit-carlos]

For example simply running microphone.current_event() turns on the microphone and there is no way to turn it off. Event with the new microphone.stop_recording().

[microbit-carlos]

@dpgeorge I was wondering if we should change microphone.stop_recording() to simply be microphone.stop() so that it could also apply for this use case where we might not want to listen for microphone events in the background?

[dpgeorge]

We could add a separate microphone.stop_listening() method. Then the microphone will have two modes that it can independently start/run/stop: listening and recording.

I'm not sure how useful it is to have them separated. Is there ever a case where you always want to be listening for SoundEvents, even during recording, and when recording stops you want to keep listening? Maybe.

Also, if you use microphone.record_into(wait=True) and it stops automatically, or you use microphone.record() (which is blocking), does it implicitly turn off listening when it finishes recording?

[microbit-carlos]

Agreed, the user might want to control the microphone events and recording independently, so we should have two independent functions: stop_recording() and stop_listening()