Why was the virtual microphone question closed?

Question

Question: Android Virtual Microphone

Close vote reason:

This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

• "This question does not appear to be about software recommendations, within the scope defined in the help center." – winterblood, unor, Nick Wilde, アズーサ, aman207

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According to the help center, a question is required to have "a purpose — a task to accomplish, a user story" and "objective requirements — a minimum set of features".

The question in this case describes the following requirements:

• The ability to use a virtual microphone instead of a real one of a "headset".
• The ability to feed audio from files or other devices into the virtual microphone.
• Request for a Android Java library or documentation.

I admit that the question is not as succinct as it could possibly be and the request for documentation is furthermore off-topic. Apart from that, it is certainly a valid question for SR in my eyes.

• Why did it get closed?
• Why has no one of the closers left a comment explaining the close votes?
  
  While this is of course not feasible (and desirable) for all off-topic questions, this question does deserve an explanation in my opinion since it actually fits the rules described by the help center.

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EDIT As a general response to the two answers received so far:

To be clear, I don't directly say that closing the question had been the wrong action. The question is not entirely off-topic as it also seeks for software recommendations.
I would therefore consider closing the question + leaving a helpful comment to be a much more welcome response — especially to new contributors.

Answer 1

First to admit, that page in the help center is not yet complete (it will hopefully be filled when we mature), so it's not that helpful in some context.

But to your question: This site is named Software Recommendations as it is about recommending software for specific purposes. While that includes libraries and APIs for developers, everything else is out – especially asking for material (where to find matching icon sets, books, etc.), for "general howtos" – and asking for "feasibility studies" (whether something could be achievable in programming etc.), which is what that question is about:

Is there a way to create a virtual headset for which I specify a file to be read as it's input stream (or input from another device)?

The OP explicitely asks for material on this (while including libraries, he also mentions books etc. – but not for any piece of ready-to-use software).

Answer 2

You forgot to cite the bit in the help center that says that questions are supposed to be software recommendation requests. Your question appears to be asking how to do something, not what libraries or application to use.

Your question can probably be reopened if you edit it a little, to clarify that you're looking for an existing library or an existing application, and specify what features you expect from that existing library or application (what kind of API/inputs/outputs it should have).

Answer 3

I agree with Gilles and Izzy on why this question is off-topic.

As I was one of the close voters, FWIW:

On all SE sites, I rarely give comments on why I vote-to-close (well, unless I use a custom off-topic reason), because I consider the put on hold reason to be the comment. It describes what happened and gives advice on what to do next (editing or commenting). And in this case, the OP chose to comment to object against the close, which is great.

I agree that leaving a comment can be more welcome, but, at least in my opinion, it’s not necessary unless there is something to say which is not reflected in the put on hold message (… if the question gets put on hold in the first place).