Why Pod when you can Plum?

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 28 August 2008 11:50

Opinion and Analysis

Want to record audio with your iPod or iPhone? Several people I know invested in add-on hardware to turn their iPods into audio recorders. But with the iPhone, all you need is... err, not love... software!

Recording audio on the iPod should really have been a built-in feature - microphones being a near universal feature of its many and varied competitors. But for some reason Apple refused to include a microphone in its any of its iPod models.

Leaving out the mic from the iPhone was almost impossible (unless Apple expected everyone use a headset), but Apple still left out the recording application.

Anyway, the possibility of turning an iPod into a voice recorder was left open to hardware manufacturers, and many users have taken advantage of that.

A fair percentage of those individuals are journalists who use the iPod for recording interviews.

Others record university lectures. And there are any number of other circumstances where short or long audio recordings can come in useful.

Audio recording became even more popular once the the 5th generation iPod came along, as it supports 16-bit CD quality audio, instead of the far more limited 8-bit recordings possible on earlier iPod models equipped with a dock compatible microphone.

Anyway, the iPhone has a microphone, so you just need software to turn it into a recorder.

And what's the latest software for that purpose? Please read on.