Unlike pictures, sound is ambient – you can hear it even when you’re not listening “at” it the same way you have to look at something to see it. And this goes for recording, too. While you have to point a camera at a thing to tape it, you can record sound even if the mic is in your pocket.
And this in turn makes possible an app like Heard, which lets you record any sound you hear, even after you hear it.
Heard uses your iPhone to record sound for one minute (five minutes with a $2 in-app purchase) and when it fills up this buffer, it dumps the beginning and carries on. Thus, if you hear something neat – like your baby’s first words, or your brother finally admitting after all these years that he ate your birthday cake – then you can hit a button and record it.
And because audio isn’t as scannable and searchable as text, the app lets you tag the clips right there for easy finding later, and associate it with a photo from your camera roll.
One day this kind of thing will happen for audio and video automatically, and won’t have any kind of adverse effect on our phones: no muting of sound, and no hit on battery life (I’m thinking more of video here). Until then, you should probably grab this free app and fire it up next time your boss calls you. Just in case…
