- You can actually find things again. I personally have so many recordings that are all named after my home address, and it's almost impossible to find anything older than a week.
- You can take notes, both text and photo notes. For example, you can just take a picture of your amp settings to remember them. Many musicians already do that with their camera, but now you can keep it together with your recording
- Much, MUCH better handling of long recording sessions with the Time Paragraph (see website for screenshots). Voice Memos becomes practically unusable once your recording is longer than three minutes.
- Small things like when you play a recording, it will automatically play the next one after it - like Apple Music or Spotify. It is super handy when you just want to review past ideas. We know a lot of musicians who use Box instead of Dropbox for storing their recordings simply because Box will always play the whole folder, whereas Dropbox just plays a single file.
- And of course, much better recording quality by using two microphones on your iPhone instead of one - although that is actually our premium feature. Everything else I listed you get for free :-).
If you're using Voice Memos to record music today, I recommend you give the app a try. And please let me know your thoughts here once you tried it!
I currently use Voice Memos to record multi-hour rehearsals as a single recording.
I assume recording with Tape It would prevent/interfere with recording with Voice Memo. So before I try recording a rehearsal with Tape It, I'd like to load existing Voice Memo recordings to see how Tape It would add value.
Right now after rehearsal I manually extract each full run-through of a song (or important excerpts) into a separate file (then I put it into dropbox for sharing). I would find it useful if Tape It automatically creates a separate "file" for a play-through of a song, so that I don't have to manually do it. But I can't tell from the Tape It website whether something like that is possible or not. So I'd like to load an existing recording and see whether that happens.
It would be extra useful if Tape It would automatically determine and label the name of the song to each "file". I don't plan to put down my instrument and unlock my phone to label each song before/after the run-through -- I am paying attention to the rehearsal leader and don't want distraction, don't have time, etc. If it doesn't happen automatically, then Tape It's usefulness depends on how easy it is to go back and label each song -- again, I want try it with existing recordings to see how easy that would be. (It would be even better if it could identify a whole song play-through versus just an excerpt/segment. Scenario being "We made a small change and only practiced that part without a full run-through.")
For promoting the app, consider advertising on /r/bandmembers and /r/WeAreTheMusicMakers and other super-relevant subreddits. Or you can encourage some Tape It users to create/participate in threads in those subreddits about "how do you record your rehearsals".
Thank you so much for your advice on /r/bandmembers and /r/WeAreTheMusicMakers. We'll post it on Reddit tomorrow; today we focused on HN :). I'm not a regular Reddit user myself, so I truly appreciate pointers to relevant subreddits.
Regarding your use case: Unfortunately, we don't yet have support for importing recordings, but I think it's safe to give it a try on a regular practice session. You can export from Tape It the same way that you export from Voice Memos, so your existing workflow will work just fine. To export, open the detail view (either by tapping on the mini player or by long-pressing a tape in the list), then tap the three dots in the top-right corner and choose Share from the menu.
We've also been using the app ourselves for our own music making during the entire development, and we have absolutely zero tolerance for crashes or data loss. Even in cases like a sudden termination of the app, say because of your device overheating or battery issues, Tape It will recover your partial recording on the next launch.
Currently, Tape It only supports markers for individual points in a recording, not for marking a time range. You can add a marker during the rehearsal as well as add or edit them afterwards. While you record, Tape It keeps the screen on and prevents the phone from being locked, so that adding a marker is always just a single tap away. We were originally worried about the always-on screen draining your battery, but to our pleasant surprise those worries were really unnecessary.
One of the features on our todo list is some kind of text-marker that allows you to select interesting regions in your recording. Our current thinking is that once you start selecting regions in a text, the regions will show up in the list instead of the whole tape (although probably grouped by tape - it's a bit unclear yet). There won't be any destructive editing, though, so you can never cut and accidentally delete a part of a recording. Once we have that, we hope that you don't have to do the manual extraction anymore.
Regarding labelling a song: try recording speech and recording music. You'll notice that non-music regions are rendered in grey in the waveform. That way, you can easily spot the gaps between the different pieces you practiced.
I'd also be curious about your use of Dropbox: who do you share these recordings with? I'm asking because sharing (within a closed circle) is really high on our priority list, and we'd love to learn more about every use case :).
Please also feel free to also email me directly at [email protected] for a continued discussion :). I'll continue to check this thread, too, but in the long run email might be easier.
