When it comes to voice recording, I’m often drawn to the late 90s and early 2000s, when there was no smart phones, and MP3 player was barely a thing. Voice recorders all came with a tiny cassette, like the kind that Nicolas Cage used in the movie Adaptation, in which he played the struggling screen writer Charlie Hoffman.
He pushes a button and goes: “Start right before the life begins with on the planet…”. He pauses, and continues, completely lost in his own script, never in a second worries about his recorder. He doesn’t even look at it.
The cassette recorder doesn’t show the sound waves, nor the ups and downs of the sound volume, not even an obvious timer to keep track how long you’ve been recording. It just works. In fact, it works better in most cases than any of the apps we now can find. It keeps you focus on your recording, not anything else. It never fails to amaze me how these little things matters.
Here’s an example: for quite a few years, I had long commute to my office, driving. In between my countless podcasts I found the urge to find a way to catch my thoughts. What would I do?
- I’d grab the phone, with one hand while the other is on the steering wheel, try unlock it.
- For a while, I also had to bypass the popup that reminding me not use my phone when I was driving.
- After I finally launches the Voice Memo app, juggling between gazing on the phone and watching out for the road (yes, it is dangerous and I’d totally recommend not to do this), now I would be “forced” to gaze on my phone again to aim my finger on the record button.
- Now I can finally start talking to the phone. But wait, I can’t stop the recording. I need to pause the recording constantly: stop and go traffic, changing lanes, or taking an exit. Pausing on the Voice Memo app is not very straightforward, you need to swipe up the panel with the recording controls, and then tap the button. Sounds pretty easy, but try doing it when you are driving!
Having cumulated over a hundred recordings clips and spent hours sifting through the files to find the sections I really wanted, and tried many different apps that are more or less having the same issue, I got so sick of it that I decided to create one myself.
No matter how much time we spent on the UI, I don’t think an on screen UI can compete with a physical button. But we can learn from that experience and significantly improve that process. My main thesis is:
Voice memos is about memos, not sound waves. I want to build an app that truly centers around creating memos with the voice easily, smoothly, with minimum friction.
On the other hand, there are huge advantages with the technology we have today: Audio replay is like a breeze. the voice can be transcribed automatically (even the quality is still not quite there). We can tag the clips with more information like time, location. Once transcribed, the audio can be searched. It is a lot easier to edit the recording.
I didn’t have a formal training on programming. Even though I had written two apps before by myself, it was still quite a challenge to work with audio. I set out to build the first version in a month (because of the relatively simple UI) but ended up spending a year on and off the project, spending countless hours plowing through the limited documentation, StackOverflow discussions.
Finally, to recap about the idea I’m trying to convey, check out the quick demo:
You can also check out the app.
Originally published at http://longdlog.wordpress.com on November 1, 2020.
