Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

Over the last 15 months, two friends and I developed the music recording app we felt we wanted based on our own needs as musicians. It's called Tape It [1] and has just recently hit the Apple App Store [2].

We put a lot of effort into a good UX to help musicians really focus on playing their instrument instead of pretending to be a recording engineer. The app records in stereo on newer iPhones (although that's a premium feature; the free version only records in standard mono audio quality).

I would be really grateful for advice from this community on how to best approach marketing. We had a great TechCrunch article covering our launch [3], and we posted it on various music websites. Turns out advertising on Google or Apple Search is a dark art, though. We have some good ideas for developing a good social media presence, but they will take time.

Please hit us with feedback, opinions and advice that you think a young indie company like us can use at this point :). And of course, please go and try the app!

Best,

Thomas

[1] https://tape.it

[2] https://get.tape.it

[3] https://tcrn.ch/3nbODHD

The next thing we're working on right now is sharing - but not social-media like sharing, but rather sharing with friends and giving feedback. There are many ways of giving feedback, but one way is to record over someone else's track. Which means that at that point, we'll have to introduce multitracking and will automatically also support the ability to work with backing tracks.

We're also thinking a lot about how to incorporate this with workflows with existing studio software. Say, for example, that your drummer and your recording engineer are stuck tweaking the snare drum sound for the next five hours (chances are it will sound the same afterwards anyway), then you should just be able to take the track in its current form out of the DAW and use Tape It to play some new ideas over it.

Which is probably a very long anser for: yes, we'll definitely incorporate the ability to work with backing tracks. But it might take us a bit of time to find out how to get the UX right :-).

Granted, had we known that Apple would ship a much improved version of their own sound classifier in iOS 15, we probably wouldn't have invested so much work in it - their new pretrained model is truly outstanding (although it only works on iOS >= 15). But I don't regret doing it; we learned a lot about mobile deployment of ML models, which will come in very handy when we deploy our next ML features for audio quality improvements.