MP3 Recorder for Journalling
My favourite journalling application has to be Day One and I use it just about every day of the week. I have Dragon Dictate and talk to my computer to have the text converted into speech, which is just great. If you don’t have Dragon Dictate but you still like to be able to talk to your computer, well in this case your iPad, then you could use MP3 Recorder. You can use MP3 Recorder for recording whatever sort of audio that you would like to record, but on the account of the fact that the application has a calendar in it there seems to be some emphasis towards journalling.
MP3 Recorder instead of DragonDictate or DayOne
Organising your audio recordings
If you just record a series of audio recordings on a daily or weekly basis, there will be some point in time you will have recordings that you might want to go back to. You could be looking for a specific recording with a certain particular piece of information and with MP3 recorder you get a few ways of finding what it is you’re looking for. First of all, you give your audio recordings a title, but that is not nearly going to be enough. You can also add tags and memos to your recordings to further help you find what you are looking for later. I am a big fan of tagging on my Mac and I often tag files when I’m using the application Default Folder. I will also add tags to notes within Evernote so you can see I can certainly see the value in using tags to identify recordings in MP3 Recorder.
With there being a calendar within the application it is very easy for you to find recordings based upon a certain date. So if you’re looking for a recording that you did on 7th of March 2013, then you can go and tap on that date in the calendar and you will see a list of recordings made. You also get a timeline which gives you a list of your audio recordings. In the timeline it gives you the title and underneath is the memo, you can also see the tags that have been applied to that recording as well as a thumbnail of the photo, if you have added a photo to that audio.
If you know that one of your audio recordings is particularly good, then you can also make it a favourite. This will give you a further subset of your audio recordings that you can use, to find the one that you want that much easier. There is a button you can tap to get started with a search and you can start by searching for the beginning or the end date of your audio. I am quite impressed with the way that you can also tell the search to just look for audio recordings that begin on a certain date and are starred and include a photo. So you can create a search which narrows down your audio files with quite a bit of precision.
Actually making a recording
This is the easiest part of the job, all you have to do is to tap on the record button and start talking or singing or whatever it is that you want to do. You can pause or stop the recording when you’re ready and there is an area for you to enter the recording name and also underneath that there is a space for you to put in your memo. Obviously what you can do is to dictate the memo in there using Siri; another way to use audio with MP3 Recorder for iPad. At the bottom of that area underneath the memo, you have the options to add photos either from the camera or from the photo roll. It is a cinch to be able to add tags, either by selecting tags that you have already created or by making new ones.
Adding Markers to the audio
It could well be that you want to add a marker to your audio. Perhaps there is a specific point at the 25 second mark in the recording that you want to draw attention to, so there is a button which you can tap to create markers. You just have to put the play head where you want your marker in the timeline, enter the marker name and the job is done. Later you can tap on this marker and choose from play, edit or delete. If you tap on play the audio will start playing from where you put the marker.
Sharing your MP3 Recorder iPad audio recordings
From the standard iOS share icon you can choose to delete, make a zip, make a video, make a PDF or share audio. If you tap on share audio you can send it to other applications on your device, that is able to take in audio files. You also get a Wi-Fi sharing URL that you can use in your browser, for example on your Mac to download a file from your iPad. You do also have the option to share out via iTunes. You just have to do click on Tap to Stop when you have finished your sharing.
The NoStylus verdict on MP3 Recorder
The only thing that I found that didn’t work was the export out to a video, but I’m not too bothered about that. Everything else with the application worked great and I would be happy to recommend this application. It is useful for creating audio files for whatever purpose and I like the option it gives to create an audio journal with recordings of whatever length you like. I do already create audio recordings through Audioboo, but the limit there is for five minutes. So if you want to create audio recordings that you are able to keep in your own digital space, then MP3 Recorder could be one way of doing it.
