Rode Recording App

[budwzr]

I used to laugh at the concept of using an iPhone as a recording studio, but now I'm a believer.

A couple three weeks ago I bought a Rode VideoMic on sale. There's a newer model now, but it's more expensive and kind of blinged up which I don't like because I want to keep a low profile when "Urban Filming".

While waiting for the mic, I stumbled on the Rode Recording App for iPhone, so I purchased it, I think it was $8.99. Anywhoo, when I got the mic I found out that you need a $20-something dollar adapter to get iPhone to recognize it as an external mic. And even at that point you can't monitor the mic because there's nowhere to plug in earbuds.

So that sucks, yeah? So I bought a device to make the connections I needed, blah blah, see my other post on iRig. I want to focus here on the Rode Recording App.

This app gives you a whole set of great features like compression, noise gate, low pass, multiband compression, etc. The whole kaboodle. It even has the Izotope set of environment filters.

But what I like the most is the simplicity once you get everything dialed in and want to start recording. I was using the "append" setting and you can simply start/stop on the same recording until the memory runs out and there are no pops or clicks, it's very clean.

Apple is a pain in the arse that you have to connect to iTunes all the time right? But this app saves you from that. It creates an http page and becomes a web server, so you simply go to the local URL and download the file via Chrome or whatever. No need for iTunes. And no need for an internet connection in the field either. I have a standalone hotspot and it acts as a local wireless router too.

This app is well thought out, yet simple to use, but there are still some negative reviews on it. I can only guess those are from inexperienced users getting frustrated because there is quite a bit of technical settings in the background that need to be set before recording, which is as it should be. There's no such thing as "point and record" audio, like there is video.

Rode is just now coming out with an iPhone lav mic, but it's expensive, and you can easily use a cheapee AudioTechnica lav mic with the app too, so long as you're using iRig (or some other interface) as the audio input device (see other post).