some of the most important things you need in the field are reliability. you need to know that your audio/video recordings are saved. losing a golden moment that you cannot ever recreate or listen back to kills the creative flow. Just recently i have had a few times like this on the excellent service audioboo that have tipped me over the edge. I'm sure i'll be back on audioboo when the bugs are fixed or they have a class that i can pipe in my mp3 audio/tags/titles back into boo but for now i have to look at better solutions. Here are some of the features i will have with my new setup.
reliable save to the phone recordings
one of the biggest problems i have right now with recording audio on audioboo was that if the application crashes it can lose my audiofile. i'm not saying that the fire (field recorder) application from audiofile engineering will not do the same but i am pretty sure it saves the recording as you go. so if it crashes at least when you reload the app you'll have what you recorded up to that point. writing to the memory is crucial not to lose golden moments.
bulk uploads of recording when no data connection
one of the things i realised very quickly with audioboo was that i had to push the last recording i made before being able to record another clip. the problem with this process is if you have no way to upload data (your abroad and do not want to pay roaming charges for instance) you have to wait until you have access to wifi or another source. in this time you cannot do multiple recordings. this makes the software impossible to do interview after interview style recordings. having said this you will still have to write down/name each interview by this new fire/mikey/soundcloud solution but i think it will be quicker than having to wait for an interview to upload. you can lose the moment which i think is a lot worse.
so many times on audioboo i have wanted to do multiple interviews but i have had to wait until the last one has uploaded on slow edge or less than 3g speeds much to the frustration of myself and the people i want to interview. i think for both pieces of software it would be good to have a quick entry panel before the recording instead of hoping to remember the name of the person afterwards. maybe have a dropdown/selection process for interview, chat, thoughts etc and with that destinations - this would open up the software, service to other places you can post the audio. For instance i would love to be able to have access to the api at audioboo to be able to feed in/out my mp3 audio with the title, tags and geo location (if fire supports that, i need to check!) - i think there will be a demand to send content to different destinations and i would be looking to send to blip, utterli and other audioposting/hosting services as backup and for distribution.
api support straight to soundcloud
right now i have the ability from the soundcloud api to do lots of things with my content allowing me to redistribute my media after saving to lots of destinations. i do wish the pricing structure of soundcloud was looked at thou (or you could sponsor me a pro account!) because right now the pro lite is not enough for what i want to do with it. I actually think soundcloud is a solid product and although has some slick features can be duplicated into the cloud with the right team. cracking ui and system thou and we will be playing with it.
no time constraints
yeah you heard me correctly on the basic versions of audioboo you have a 3 minute time limit. i actually understand this thou, you really do not want massive files from people recording junk or white noise for hours on end, you scale the business of storage as you go and that will eventually could with a premium. i think this is sensible and was quite happy when i got boosted to 5 minutes. i actually have 20 minutes now because i am testing some of the newer features. i still have faith in audioboo to fix some of the issues that i have.
using a better external microphone - the blue mikey
if you have not heard or see the blue mikey yet it is this cracking little plugin microphone hardware for the ipod and iphone3g that allows you to record higher quality recordings on your device (obviously this adds the ability on the ipod that normally has no mic) - the mic has 3 settings with the last being incredibly sensitive - it might be useful for capturing ambient sounds outdoors i guess. the other settings allow you to record from a variety of situations including live/music and gigs. i'll have one on test next week and look forward to testing it out in some of the local bars (ie. n0shIT in a few weeks time)
edit, snip and meta tag your audio recordings on the fly
what is really impressive about the editing on FiRE is that you can set tags and markers really really easily allow you to jump forward into different sections so for a hardcore geek like me we can slice and dice and allow you to get to the juicy parts of an interview really quickly. i really like this ability, something i cannot do with audioboo but really audioboo is not designed to do such things anyway.
conclusion
the one glaring thing out of all of this is that i still like the way audioboo works in operation, yes there is much to be done on the listing of audioboo content and to reply back with a boo to a posted boo would be good, to actually track your friends and people you follow would be useful also. I have actually made a master list of things that i would like to see audioboo to build into the next version and i will be posting that blog entry next.
now that i have the ability to do this wonderful live podcasting interview thing as with all geeks we want more, i really think that bulk recording and saving to the phone as you record are things that need to be addressed very quickly as they actually hamper the use of the phone to more of a personal diary nature - they must have people screaming at them for features and having the ability to scale and formulate the next version must be so frustrating.
Also audioboo has a wonderful cross section of community that is growing out of the "keep it simple" generation of being able to make media and for this it should be applauded, to have it open for everyone and have to learn a tiny bit about the hardware is exactly why audioboo does so well. it's a hard decision to make but i think i would splinter the product into different genres - a simple version, a journo version and a pro version. three different products same interface but with different add on features. again, i would hate to be making those choices of what goes into what right now especially when growing so rapidly.
So the parts you need to make this wonderful thing happen are listed below.
FiRE on the iphone - $5.99 (think cheaper now)
blue mikey microphone - £65 (@dolphinmusic is where mine is coming from)
soundcloud account - £85 a year - pro lite version (pricing is a bit steep right now)
when i get my blue mikey next week i'll be testing recording on FiRE for a few days and uploading it to soundcloud and hopefully will be able to talk to audioboo about making something with the api that takes my boos from soundcloud and feeds them back into audioboo. i really love the community of people that are already on audioboo and in similar fashion to twitter i am always going to be where my friends are.
one of the biggest problems i have right now with recording audio on audioboo was that if the application crashes it can lose my audiofile. i'm not saying that the fire (field recorder) application from audiofile engineering will not do the same but i am pretty sure it saves the recording as you go. so if it crashes at least when you reload the app you'll have what you recorded up to that point. writing to the memory is crucial not to lose golden moments.
bulk uploads of recording when no data connection
one of the things i realised very quickly with audioboo was that i had to push the last recording i made before being able to record another clip. the problem with this process is if you have no way to upload data (your abroad and do not want to pay roaming charges for instance) you have to wait until you have access to wifi or another source. in this time you cannot do multiple recordings. this makes the software impossible to do interview after interview style recordings. having said this you will still have to write down/name each interview by this new fire/mikey/soundcloud solution but i think it will be quicker than having to wait for an interview to upload. you can lose the moment which i think is a lot worse.
so many times on audioboo i have wanted to do multiple interviews but i have had to wait until the last one has uploaded on slow edge or less than 3g speeds much to the frustration of myself and the people i want to interview. i think for both pieces of software it would be good to have a quick entry panel before the recording instead of hoping to remember the name of the person afterwards. maybe have a dropdown/selection process for interview, chat, thoughts etc and with that destinations - this would open up the software, service to other places you can post the audio. For instance i would love to be able to have access to the api at audioboo to be able to feed in/out my mp3 audio with the title, tags and geo location (if fire supports that, i need to check!) - i think there will be a demand to send content to different destinations and i would be looking to send to blip, utterli and other audioposting/hosting services as backup and for distribution.
api support straight to soundcloud
right now i have the ability from the soundcloud api to do lots of things with my content allowing me to redistribute my media after saving to lots of destinations. i do wish the pricing structure of soundcloud was looked at thou (or you could sponsor me a pro account!) because right now the pro lite is not enough for what i want to do with it. I actually think soundcloud is a solid product and although has some slick features can be duplicated into the cloud with the right team. cracking ui and system thou and we will be playing with it.
no time constraints
yeah you heard me correctly on the basic versions of audioboo you have a 3 minute time limit. i actually understand this thou, you really do not want massive files from people recording junk or white noise for hours on end, you scale the business of storage as you go and that will eventually could with a premium. i think this is sensible and was quite happy when i got boosted to 5 minutes. i actually have 20 minutes now because i am testing some of the newer features. i still have faith in audioboo to fix some of the issues that i have.
using a better external microphone - the blue mikey
if you have not heard or see the blue mikey yet it is this cracking little plugin microphone hardware for the ipod and iphone3g that allows you to record higher quality recordings on your device (obviously this adds the ability on the ipod that normally has no mic) - the mic has 3 settings with the last being incredibly sensitive - it might be useful for capturing ambient sounds outdoors i guess. the other settings allow you to record from a variety of situations including live/music and gigs. i'll have one on test next week and look forward to testing it out in some of the local bars (ie. n0shIT in a few weeks time)
edit, snip and meta tag your audio recordings on the fly
what is really impressive about the editing on FiRE is that you can set tags and markers really really easily allow you to jump forward into different sections so for a hardcore geek like me we can slice and dice and allow you to get to the juicy parts of an interview really quickly. i really like this ability, something i cannot do with audioboo but really audioboo is not designed to do such things anyway.
conclusion
the one glaring thing out of all of this is that i still like the way audioboo works in operation, yes there is much to be done on the listing of audioboo content and to reply back with a boo to a posted boo would be good, to actually track your friends and people you follow would be useful also. I have actually made a master list of things that i would like to see audioboo to build into the next version and i will be posting that blog entry next.
now that i have the ability to do this wonderful live podcasting interview thing as with all geeks we want more, i really think that bulk recording and saving to the phone as you record are things that need to be addressed very quickly as they actually hamper the use of the phone to more of a personal diary nature - they must have people screaming at them for features and having the ability to scale and formulate the next version must be so frustrating.
Also audioboo has a wonderful cross section of community that is growing out of the "keep it simple" generation of being able to make media and for this it should be applauded, to have it open for everyone and have to learn a tiny bit about the hardware is exactly why audioboo does so well. it's a hard decision to make but i think i would splinter the product into different genres - a simple version, a journo version and a pro version. three different products same interface but with different add on features. again, i would hate to be making those choices of what goes into what right now especially when growing so rapidly.
So the parts you need to make this wonderful thing happen are listed below.
FiRE on the iphone - $5.99 (think cheaper now)
blue mikey microphone - £65 (@dolphinmusic is where mine is coming from)
soundcloud account - £85 a year - pro lite version (pricing is a bit steep right now)
when i get my blue mikey next week i'll be testing recording on FiRE for a few days and uploading it to soundcloud and hopefully will be able to talk to audioboo about making something with the api that takes my boos from soundcloud and feeds them back into audioboo. i really love the community of people that are already on audioboo and in similar fashion to twitter i am always going to be where my friends are.
