Sing the Blues with Mikey

The iPhone is a competent little field audio recorder. Since it can make CD-quality, 44.1 mhz, 16-bit recordings, it rivals the dedicated stereo field recorders in the under $500 price range.

The built-in mike is not up to the task of making professional recordings, but the Blue Mikey is. This $80 attachment is the best quality snap-in mike available for the iPhone. It has the largest condensers for it's size, allowing a nicer bass response for good, flat recordings.

The built-in mike is fine for recording audio notes and lectures, but where the Mikey excels is in making professional recordings of voice and music. The three-position input switch covers must audio recording situations, with the lowest setting just made for recording live performances. Expect to hear a lot of bootlegs recorded with Mikey in the future, since it's small enough to pass through security and remain inconspicuous while recording. Check out Derek Helmer's U2 recording. The Mikey's 5-position swivel head allows for a lot of positioning flexibility.

There's not a lot that's bad about the Mikey. It's biggest issues are that it doesn't fit snugly into the port of the iPhone, has little stereo separation (a weakness when recording sound effects) and no line input (the TuneTalk and iVoicePro both offer this.) But I think once you hear the quality of recordings, these won't annoy most.

I have been using the Mikey with the 4-track stereo RecordStudioPro app on my iPhone for recording professional demos, voiceovers and percussion loops. The Mikey can be can be placed 6 inches away from an amp at practice volume or can record a chorus in a cathedral. The two give the musician and producer a lot of flexibility to make CD-quality recordings anywhere with a minimum of fuss.

Tip: One issue with the mike attachments for the iPhone is that playback comes through the speaker, not through the headphones. This is especially annoying with multitrack recording apps. You can start playback, unplug the headphones and plug them back in to route the audio through the headphones, but it's a pain to do each time. For playback I find it easier to instead record to an empty track and mute it. If a track is being recorded, your iPhone will play through the headphones.

Comics on Your iPhone

Two cool apps for your iPhone can make some impressive-looking comics from of your photos. PhotoArtist will convert your photos to comics drawings. Though these are just sets of filters, the results are very impressive. The real shortfall of this app is that you're limited to screen-size results.

Comic Touch is by far the best photo captioning software available for your iPhone. In addition to making clean balloons, it has an authentic comic strip font. The smudge tool is great, but the warp tools would probably best be replaced by graphic effects more like PhotoArtist has.

The two apps together make a good combo. (You thought I was going to say Dynamic Duo, didn't you?) Together they can make a comic photo of a friend that you can email from your iPhone that they'll be talking about and passing around for months.

Car Charge Fixed

I've mentioned before about the charging issue caused when Apple removed the deprecated Firewire charger recently from iPhones and iPods. Griffin introduced Charge Converter which works with old connectors and new iPods. They're $24.95 and welcome news for those of us who were looking into the $500-$1000 it would cost to replace our old iPod ready car stereos.

Notes, Finally

Notes finally sync with Mac Mail and Outlook. To enable notes:

• Plug in your iPhone to your desktop.
• In iTunes, click on your iPhone in the Library list.
• Click on the Info tab.
• Check the Notes box.
• Click the Sync button.

Now open Mac Mail or Outlook. You will see all the notes from your iPhone and Mail synced on both your Phone and desktop. Note that notes won't transfer over the air, only by cable sync.

While it seems a small victory, it's one more step towards making your iPhone's Notes app indespensible. I've covered Notes Search option and the fact that more and more text, like street addresses, numbers and links are smartext that your iPhone can identify and trigger apps like mail, Safari and Maps. This gives you the ability to save huge blocks of text as a note on your desktop and transfer it over to your iphone.

You'd think from the interface of Notes on your iPhone that they're plain text. They're actually rich text, but you have no way of changing this on your iPhone. However, you can use rich text in notes created on your desktop. As you see here they iPhone can view these just fine. It can also send rich text notes as rich text email. So if you want to write up some fancy directions that you send out regularly, you can write these as a note on your desktop with formatting and then sync to your iPhone, the formatting sticks when your email the note. The annoying yellow note background will not be sent in your email.

Font, size and color translate provided the font is viewable on your iPhone. The Mail ToDo will appear in the note you your iPhone (as well as when a Note is sent as email) as text. And attachments don't transfer either. The paperclip marking where an attachment was in a note created in Mail is a graphic you can't do anything with.

App: RecordStudio Pro

After examining the multi-track recorder apps in the App Store RecordStudio stood out. No frills here, just simplicity. Many others had tacky, confusing interfaces and a ton of features that looked easy to get lost in and seemed like they'd be better done later on a computer. Record Studio is a nice little musical scratchpad that records 4 CD-quality tracks.

The quality of the built-in 3Gs iPhone mic with RecordStudio is substantially better than you'd expect. You can set your iPhone on the edge of a table for recording acoustic strings, in front of an amp at low volume for amped instruments or hold it in your hand for vocals.

RecordStudio has a sleek interface and is no nonsense. You tap a track to put it in record mode and then tap the record button. You're rolling. And RecordStudio is very stable when it comes to laying down tracks. I'm seeing issues with this in competing apps.

One thing to be aware about this app is that you can't hear the track you're recording in the headphones. I assume this was done because of latency problems. What's amazing is that there are no latency issues with RecordStudio. These exist in apps like Garage Band and even in dedicated digital workstations. It's refreshing not to have to face them in RecordStudio. There's no punch-in or cue. While some may not like this, it keeps the controls to what's necessary.

RecordStudio gives you a flat "dry" recording with no effects and doesn't do mixdown. Competing multitrack apps for the iPhone seem to be limited on mixdown capabilities. And this is really best left to an app like Garage Band or Audacity. Once you send the tracks to your computer by WiFi you can set up patches that gate the noise and add effects to really sweeten your tracks. You'll be surprised with what the symbiotic relationship between RecordStudio and an app like Garage Band can create.

One nice feature is that you can import stereo backing tracks and still have three tracks to record. This allows you to add instrumental and beat tracks. RecordStudio can take short .aif file and loop them. This feature is Ideal for rapp and hiphop artists, but is also useful for composing. I created a bunch of loops in Garage Band with a Kaossilator and have these always handy on my iPhone for experimenting. There is also a metronome which takes up a track, but you can turn it off once you have three tracks down and free up the fourth track.

So will you record your next album in RecordStudio? Probably not, but you'll find yourself doing crude demos on the fly with it. The beauty of RecordStudio is that with a decent set of earbuds you can take it and record whenever or wherever inspiration strikes.