The humble voice recorder is one of a smartphone’s most used functions, but listening back to files and still worse transcribing them remains a chore. Until Google or Nuance make transcription completely automatic, apps are an essential tool to help the process.
Recordium, sadly iOS only, is among the best I’ve encountered – and journalists encounter quite a lot in a feeble quest for the painless interview. It’s a combined audio editor and recorder that lets you upload files to Dropbox, Drive, Evernote and more automatically.
Where it really sings, however, is in the easy ability to annotate, mark up and highlight recordings – so in a half-hour lecture you can note that certain sections are more relevant than others, or add your extra reactions. You can record in aiff, wav, caf or mp4, and speed up or slow down sections too.
Although devices such as the Livescribe pen do similar things, such products, integrating a recorder into a pen that uses a special notebook, are considerably more expensive and clunkier than a mere free app.
Recordium auto-saves, making the loss of a recording less likely, and offers different sampling rates so you can make files bigger or smaller. At its best on the iPad, it’s easy to highlight specific passages, add tags and insert typed notes. If you’re really confident, you can save your edited version over the top of the original. Free until June, there’s no reason not to try it out.
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