Best voice recording apps

Voice recording apps are convenient for quickly taking notes, or jotting down ideas without having to hold a pen to paper. Whether you’re a journalist in an interview, a singer-songwriter demoing new song ideas, or a student planning to record an hour-long lecture, you’ll want to use an app that is easy to use and provides you with enough control over your recordings.

The best voice recording app for Android is Easy Voice Recorder

Among all the voice recording apps available for Android, Digipom’s Easy Voice Recorder is considered to be the most popular.

Easy Voice Recorder has a clean and straightforward interface that makes creating, organizing, and sharing your recordings a seamless experience. The app also utilizes 16-bit PCM and MP4 audio codecs for high quality recording and playback. Additional features that make this app an Android favorite include the lack of software recording limitations and support for Android Wear OS (formerly Android Wear), enabling voice recordings from a smart watch.

One drawback to the app is its exclusion of convenience-oriented features, which are only included in the Pro version. These features include clip trimming/editing, MP3 and AAC codec support, Bluetooth microphone support, skip silence, custom bitrate selection, and automatic cloud storage uploading. Fortunately, the upgrade only requires a one time payment of $3.99—less than a cup of coffee.

What you need to know about voice recording apps

When it comes to voice recording apps, the name of the game is convenience, rather than quality. Voice recording apps don’t usually have support for the highest-quality audio formats, nor do they feature any extensive noise filtering capabilities like high-frequency boosts or low-cut filters. More importantly, smartphone microphones aren’t exactly studio-grade, using capsules that have a limited frequency response and imbalanced sound signature.

If you’re someone who needs to record the clearest vocals or samples on-the-go, you’d be better served by a portable voice recorder. This may sound like an investment, however there are a selection of budget voice recorders available. Otherwise, if you just need a way of recording voices or other sounds on-the-spot, voice recording apps are your best friend.

You’re not limited by your imagination, just by your storage space

If you’re someone who consistently makes long recordings, such as a two-hour class lecture or five-hour jam session, be weary of recording limits posed by your device. Some apps like Easy Voice Recorder don’t have a recording limit built-in—though, it will stop recording when your phone’s hard drive is critically low on space. Meanwhile, apps like Smart Recorder app have file size limits, which may be inconvenient for some users. It might be a good idea to check your phone now and then to make sure it’s still recording.

Audio transcriptions are a growing trend among recording apps

If you’ve ever used a voice recording app to record a two hour lecture, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of having to self-transcribe your audio notes; having to constantly rewind and turn up the volume to near-max just because your professor didn’t enunciate clearly. It would be much easier to just have someone transcribe the audio for you.

Software developers have come up with different approaches to creating audio transcriptions. For example, Rev Voice Recorder is an app that allows you to record voice memos, and send them off to a real human to transcribe the audio for you—all for a small fee. Meanwhile, Google is taking the more innovative route by developing an app that uses AI to automatically generate transcriptions. This technology is still in its infancy, but the results are promising.

Apple’s Voice Memos app is the best voice recording app for iPhone

Voice Memos is a free voice recording app used by many—from students to singer-songwriters. Besides recording voices, the app is often used by artists to spontaneously record audio samples and song demos.

The popularity of Voice Memos lies in its simple design, which is a trademark of Apple software. Upon opening the app, a bright red record button lies at the bottom of the screen, allowing you to start recording instantly, with added timecode and waveform readouts. The app also includes a trim function for basic audio editing. When you’re done recording and editing, the file is saved locally to your drive, and is automatically synced across your Apple devices via iCloud. File transfers between other Apple devices are also instantaneous thanks to the company’s proprietary AirDrop file sharing feature.

Related: Best podcast apps

Unfortunately, Voice Memos does possess some limitations. The most obvious drawback is that this app is only available on iOS devices. Moreover, Voice Memos has limited codec support, using MPEG-4 for recording, and either Apple’s AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) or ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) for compression.

Google’s Recorder app is the most innovative

Over the years, Google has made leaps and bounds in the realm of artificial intelligence. Announced alongside the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, Recorder is the company’s free voice recording app that automates the process of transcribing audio, rendering human transcription services a thing of the past.

The Recorder app goes above and beyond merely transcribing people’s speech, with the ability to recognize other sounds such as music, applauding, and even animal noises. Because of this automated transcription process, you now have the ability to search for recordings based on what’s been said, rather than just looking up clip titles. Amazingly, audio transcriptions are done locally on the device, rather than online with a constant Internet connection.

Because this type of app is still maturing, there are a few caveats. For starters, the app is only officially supported on select Google Pixel devices, like the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. However, some people have found ways to run the app on unsupported devices. Other limitations include English-only language support, limited codec support (AAC only), and no basic editing/clip trim tools.

The Rev Voice Recorder is a cross-platform solution for people who need audio transcriptions

Featuring a clean UI and relatively cost-effective pricing scheme, the Rev Voice Recorder app is meant for people who are willing to pay for reliable audio transcriptions.

Available for both Android and iOS, the app itself is rather simple with a clean design that makes recording an instantaneous process. There aren’t any fancy controls to look forward to; and it lacks support for high-quality audio formats, editing tools, and custom recording settings.

Rev Voice Recorder uses humans to transcribe your audio for fewer mistakes, but it’s a costly service.

The heart of the app lies in its ability to quickly send your voice recordings for transcription, which costs at $1.25 per minute of audio. All transcriptions are done by humans, and the company promotes a turnaround time of 12 hours or less. If time really is money to you, and if you’d rather not go through the hassle of transcribing audio by hand, the Rev Voice Recorder is definitely worthy of your consideration.

If you need a robust voice recording app, check out Smart Recorder

If you need total control over your voice recordings, SmartMob’s Smart Recorder may be the app for you, especially if you’re an Android user.

The app features a great interface that gives you control over parameters that aren’t found in most recording apps. This includes Wave/PCM encoding support, mic gain control and calibration tools, sample rate control, and skip silence. A live audio spectrum analyzer is also included in the app, allowing you to better visualize your recordings.

As advanced as this app may be, it doesn’t feature any editing tools, so you’ll still have to export your recordings to another audio app for processing. Smart Recorder also has a 2GB recording limit, which means you’ll either have to tweak your recording settings, or just keep a lookout to make sure you’re still recording. As with most free apps, Smart Recorder has in-app purchases that allow you to unlock additional features, such as removing those pesky ads.

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