iPhonefreak width="190"

In my job, I often have the need to record stuff: I do many interviews in the course of a day. I can also be a little scatter-brained, and it’s nice to record reminders about what I need at the grocery store, or where I parked in the mall. That’s why finding a voice recorder was one of the first applications I hunted for after getting my iPhone. The one I settled on was Recorder, by Retronyms.

Recorder, a .99 app, couldn’t be easier to use. At the bottom is a gigantic red “Record” button. Hit the button and start yapping. While it’s recording, you’ll get a graphic that shows the audio levels — low levels means the audio is soft, and the higher the bars get, the louder the audio. Simple and effective.

Playback is simple as well. Just press the name of the recording, which is presented as a list. By default, the recordings get the name “Memo 1, Memo 2″ and so on. I find it highly valuable to immediately give it a meaningful name.

However, the layout isn’t the most logical in the world. For instance, to delete a recording, you have to press “Edit” in the top-left corner. But to edit a recording (which is where you’d go to change the name), you push the blue “greater than” symbol to the right of the recording. That’s counter-intuitive.

It also took me awhile to figure out how to transfer my recordings to my Mac’s hard drive. Notice in the screenshot the tiny “Wifi Sync” graphic in the lower-left corner. Pressing that (and assuming you have wi-fi access, which is required) brings you to a screen that gives you an IP address to type into your browser window. Typing in the address brings you to the Web interface for Recorder, which has a listing of all your recordings. Saving to your hard drive from there is simple, but I wonder how many non-technical people will understand what is being required with that fairly complicated process. I doubt anyone in my family other than me (and several of my children are pretty astute technically) could have figured it out without a lot of work and manual reading.

One other nitpick: I’d like it if the recording you’re currently listening to were emphasized more — set apart from the rest of the recordings in the list. It’s easy to try and pause the recording, and instead hit another recording that’s above or below it in the list, and lose your place (since the other recording starts and the one you were listening to stops).

If you don’t need to do a lot of transferring of your recordings, though, Recorder works very well (and once you’ve got the transfer process down, it’s not hard, but still time-consuming). I’ve used it substantially in the last several weeks, and am impressed with its capabilities — especially as a less-than-a-dollar application. I recommend it.