I’ve done a lot of interviews this week. Knowing that was going to be the case, I took a little time Monday morning to find a good recording app for my iPhone because frankly, I don’t take dictation well. I like to be able to focus on what someone is saying so that I can engage them with good follow up questions, rather than being focused on trying to remember what they just said.
So I read some reviews on line and decided to go with the HT Recorder app, and I have to say it’s been awesome. The interface is really intuitive. It has a great range – anyone talking within a six foot radius comes through nice and clear. It also has some neat playback options like the 5 second jump forward or back buttons and the x1.2 or x1.4 options that speed up the recording to skip the boring parts. If your recording comes in under 30 minutes you can email it to yourself and play it on iTunes, but really I didn’t end up using that since the playback functionality is so good on the phone.
The one thing it doesn’t do is record phone calls actually taking place on the iPhone. I had hoped that if I put the caller on speaker it would record us both, but the app doesn’t work at all while the phone is engaged. Still, the easy fix was to call my interviewee on my land line, (ask for permission to record), then put them on speaker phone right next to the iPhone with the recorder app running. That was an acceptable work-around.
Overall 4 out of 5 stars.
Leave a Reply