A Portable Voice Recorder (famously known as a Dictaphone) has always been a companion to reporters, students and to any professional wanting to keep things on record. The change from cassette-based Dictaphones to digital ones made them sleeker and lighter, and you could jump between recordings in an instant. But still, that’s pretty much where the function of most Voice Recorders ended — you still had to put those files on a computer for further usage. Now, a combination of Smartphones and powerful apps is on the verge of making yet another standalone device redundant.
Recordium is a Universal app available for both the iPhone and iPad. At just $2, Recordium runs circles around the primitive Voice Recorder app that comes built into iOS. The app has a no-frills design, and it takes only a few minutes to figure out how it works. There’s also an inline tutorial as you begin exploring the app for the first time. First and foremost — you’ve got folders to organise your recordings. Filenames are complimented by helpful information like their duration and creation date. To record new audio, simply click the microphone button. Recording begins, and the app goes to the Recording screen with a big pause button in the middle. There’s a incredibly nifty auto-pause feature, which stops the recording if there’s continued silence. It also promptly resumes recording the moment there’s any sound. Next, you also have an input gain adjustment; which will prove useful when the audio you’re trying to capture is too faint. In the settings menu, you have control over the formats the audio gets recorded in and its quality. The best quality MP4 recording takes just about 30MB per hour. Meaning a gigabyte of memory on your iOS device will give you close to a day and a half of recording.
After recording your clip, opening it up takes you to the ‘Playback’ menu. Here’s where all the action happens! You can play the audio at actual speed, slow it down or speed it up. A waveform graph at the bottom lets you accurately scrub to the desired point in the recording. There are different methods by which you can append information to the recording. First, you’ve got a highlighting tool that simply marks the recording between two points in the graph; think how you’d use an actual marker to highlight important text in a book. Clicking the ‘+’ button next to the marker tool makes it roll sideways to reveal the other tools. There’s one for inserting Notes, Pictures, and Tags at desired locations of the recording. You can write paragraphs of text using the Notes tool, while you can create tags that are easier to insert for repetitive use. These tools serve as useful visual aid to add more sense and relevance to the audio. Clicking any of these flags shows a small thumbnail of the info you’ve added. They can be moved to different locations or deleted by simply pressing-and-holding them, like you would on an iOS app icon.
Next, you can also trim, snip or delete portions of the recording. That’s on-the-fly editing of your audio; no computer needed. After you’re done with all that, there are many ways to share the file. Simply swipe left-to-right over the filename in the folder view, and you’ll get various sharing options like a Share Sheet for all supported 3rd party iOS apps like Dropbox, WhatsApp, Evernote etc. You can also traditionally email it as an attachment. Another awesome feature is WiFi Sync; where if your computer and iOS device are in the same network, just punch in the mentioned IP address in your computer browser. It gives you a list of all your recordings in the browser with links to ‘download’ them from phone to computer wirelessly.
To see Recordium’s features in action, they’ve made short videos so click here and go check them out. Bottom line — if you use (or plan to use) your iPhone or iPad in place of a dictaphone, then Recordium is absolutely a worthy purchase for you! It is available on the App Store for just $1.99.