Great Recorder - Love the Audio Boost, Visualizer, and Conversion In-Apps

BASIC RECORDER
I use “Voice Recorder HD” to record live music, environmental sounds, lectures, and group discussions with my iPhone and iPad mini. It works very well and is reliable; my longest recording was 8 hours without any glitches or crashing. I like the three “Quality” settings. I use the High setting for wide bandwidth music recordings and the Low setting for lectures and group discussions to minimize memory usage. I would have run out of memory if I did not use the Low setting for my 8 hour recording! The Medium setting is a good compromise between bandwidth and low memory usage.

IN-APP PURCHASES

AUDIO BOOST
The Audio Boost in-app purchase is extremely useful, especially for lecture and group discussion recordings. There always seems to be one person really LOUD and close to the microphone and others far away and quiet. Unless you are listening to your recordings with headphones in a quiet room, you are constantly changing the iPhone volume control to hear the quiet people and avoid blasting your ears when the loud people talk. The Audio Boost does this automatically and has three settings: whisper, standard, and high fidelity.

The “high fidelity” mode does the minimum amount of volume level adjusting and basically “levels” your recordings so they will play back at the same level as your music or phone calls. I use this settings for live music recordings and to avoid changing the volume level between this and other apps.

I use the “standard” setting the most. It does more volume level adjusting and works great with lecture and group discussion recordings, allowing the quiet/far people to be heard as easily as the loud/close people.

The “whisper” setting is like an audio microscope; you can easily hear low level sounds, such as HVAC fan noise, people turning pages, anything really quiet. It does tend to produce noisier recordings (background noise does get amplified), so I do not use this setting very much.

AUDIO VISUALIZER
I purchased the Audio Visualizer for fun. It is a low resolution waveform display of the recording that shows where the loud and quiet parts of your recording are located in time. I like to compare the pre and post Audio Boost recordings with the visualizer; it is obvious where the audio boosting occurred.

WAV to M4A CONVERSION
WAV recordings are like music CDs in that both are uncompressed data formats. Converting to an M4A compressed file format uses much less memory. Audiophiles claim the compressed files do not sound as good as the uncompressed files, but for a lecture or group discussion, who cares!

OTHER
I do any required editing of my recordings on my iMac with another app, so I can’t comment on the Playback Controls or the Trimming in-app purchases.

CONCLUSION
Overall, this is a great app!

Innovate_Me ! about Voice Recorder HD, v9.4