Sure, Apple stuffs the iPhone full of perfectly functional apps before they hit stockrooms. Ok, more-or-less functional. Look, who are we kidding here: Many of the iPhone’s native apps are about as functional as a box of matches; sure, I can get a fire started with it (maybe) — but if I really want to set something ablaze, I’d rather have a butane torch. Or a flamethrower.
Enter Blue Fire, Blue Microphone‘s audio-recording app: a scaled-down, free version of Audiofile Engineering‘s Fire pro-grade recording app. Both Lonnie and I have mentioned it briefly before, and we’re both impressed with it. In fact, I’m so impressed that it’s replaced the native Voice Memos app on my iPhone as my memo recorder of choice, and as a backup to my trusty Olympus recorder for really important stuff, like interviews.
Why? Two big reasons. The first is the ability to select from three different quality settings, which makes a big difference when making loooong recordings and storage space is tight. The second is one of those can’t-live-without features that should have been included in Apple’s version — the ability to make index marks and advance or rewind the recording to the next/last mark; this feature alone would be worth a couple of dollars.
Add to that a great UI that’s not as pretty as Apple’s Voice Memos, but is way more useful with a dominating time readout, level readout and waveform that’ll visually indicate which spots are loud/quiet on the recording, so they can be skipped to/over — great when used in conjunction with index marks.
About the only thing missing from the native app is emailability, but then, Blue Fire is skewed toward large recordings, the kind too large to fit in an email anyway; so Blue Fire includes a handy FTP upload function.
Props to Audiofile Engineering for a great app, and high fives to Blue Microphones for putting a free version out there.
