Recording and playing back on iPhone - WHY IS IT SO HARD?!

I

isiton212

New member
This is driving me crazy.

I just want to record myself practising, with a minimum of fuss. Like, when I've got a few minutes after work, or if I'm jamming with a friend, I want to plug my guitar into the iphone, play a song, and get a recording/backing track of the song I can listen to in the car on the way home. Sounds simple, right? I don't want full edit suite capabilities, looping, drum tracks etc - just record and playback.

It seems that every app I try, is either unable to play the sound back through the dock connector (the way my car kit hooks up), or has some absurdly complicated way of transferring files (like FTP ffs!!!) that requires sitting down at a computer and/or bouncing files half way round the world in order to get them back into iTunes on the same device they were recorded on.

I've bought the Tascam IXJ2, to preamp the guitar input and for when I get a little mic, and right now I'm trying to get the Tascam PCMRecorder app to work. It seems to record just fine, the VU meters jiggle around when playing back, but I get no sound. I don't have headphones here at the office, so I don't know if that's the issue, but you'd think it should just play back through the iPhone's speaker if that's all that's available. To transfer files from this app I need a Soundcloud account, which I've just created, only to discover I can't make it private - apparently the whole world must hear my dodgy playing at the same time I do. It's irrelevant anyway, because despite uploading several recordings I can't find any of them on soundcloud anyway.

Sorry this is turning into a rant, I'm just gobsmacked at how absurdly complicated it is to do this apparently simple thing.

Does anyone else here share my pain? What am I doing wrong? What app should I be using to record, and how should I be transferring and listening to the files?!

Thank you.
 
Hi guitarplayer82, thanks, but that wasn't the problem. The Tascam app (I've since found) has a separate 'speaker' button on another page that acts like a mute :facepalm:. I can also confirm that it will play back via the dock connector too.

Still can't get to grips with Soundcloud, it seems like a ridiculous way to have to access my own recordings. After uploading (HUGE files from Tascam PCMRecorder BTW) I have to 'edit' the track to enable downloads before I can download it myself. The minute I signed up I had somebody 'following' me, presumably this is some kind of automated attempt from them to gain more 'followers', but it is annoying that everything I do is immediately in the public domain. Being an antisocial git I have no interest in social media at the best of times, let alone in my more intimate moments of musical noodling.

I've downloaded a bunch of other apps, which I guess I'll just work through, but it would be great to hear from someone with experience in this area that could save me some time and point me in the right direction.
 
Hey,
I don't know how the soundcloud process works directly from your app, but I do use it for day to day sharing.

The editing process that you mentioned is standard. While a file is uploading you're given time to name it and write whatever comments you might want to put. Obviously you don't, but you know what I mean.

From a PC, at least, that page also allows you to choose if the track is to be private or not.

Going from memory here, but I think that's right.
 
Well, it is a phone after all.
Sometimes the expectations we are lead to have a too high or difficult to achieve in reasonable circumstances.
That's called marketting.
 
Thanks guys.

Regarding the 'it's a phone' philosophy, I guess that is true to some extent, but it's also a little computer that's probably a thousand times more powerful than the one that landed Neil Armstrong on the moon. Or something. And besides, it isn't the TECHNOLOGY that's the problem here - the iPhone can record, and it can play back. And it has a touch-screen interface and solid state memory and a 1GHz dual-core processor and all the other ingredients you need to do some very clever things. The problem (at least to my mind) is more likely to be things like the licensing of the technology, and poor app design, that create roadblocks that mean we can't record directly to a popular format and then play it back in the native media player.

Instead, we need to use bizarre workarounds like ftp uploads (seriously, FTP?!) and social networking in order to get the files out of the device, convert them, and re-import them. In the meantime we can only access them via the recording app itself, which may or may not have decent playback functionality.

FWIW, I might as well add in what I now know about recording on the iPhone, in case it helps someone else or triggers some further discussion.

There's a saying among photographers that 'the best camera is the one you have with you'. I reckon the same is true for an audio recorder. The iPhone is clever and powerful, and if you own one it's probably less than 3 feet away. With just a couple of tiny accessories you can be up and recording to a standard that is WAY higher than analog tape, which served a lot of us pretty well for more years than we care to remember.

Up to and including the iPhone 3S, the Apple dock connector included analog stereo line level inputs. Devices like Blue's original Mikey fed audio in from their own preamps (or an external line level source) and the iPhone's built-in DA converters did the rest. With the iPhone 4, Apple removed this functionality and the only analog audio inputs left are the built-in mic and the mono mic input on the 3.5mm headphone jack.

You can plug a guitar straight into the iPhone's 3.5mm socket with the right cable (eg Belkin's GuitarConnect). I haven't analyzed the quality of the recorded sound but I've heard it and it seems quite good. You certainly can't beat the simplicity. But if you want to record voice AND guitar, ideally on separate channels, and with a bit more control, then you'll need external preamps and DAs. As I mentioned above, I've just got hold of the Tascam iXJ2, which has the allegedly "acclaimed NJM4580 operational amplifier" and 44.1 kHz/16-Bit DAs. There may be other devices but I'm not aware of them.

Unfortunately I'm managing a business by day and renovating a house by night, so opportunities for testing are few (hence my desire to keep things simple and my frustration with them when they aren't). But with the Tascam adapter, a small mono guitar lead and a compact mic of some description (not yet purchased), I should have a pretty neat little recording setup that costs very little, takes up almost no room, and lets me record myself and/or friends singing and playing in reasonably high quality, so that's why I'm going down this path instead of splashing out on some serious new hardware.
 
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