Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

news.ycombinator.com

71–80 of 116 posts

Re: Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

#71

I like the minimalism and thoughtfulness of the interface. Something is not clear however. Where do recordings get stored? On device, iCloud? I think it would be nice to know where your data gets stored, and maybe have a choice or two.

Currently, all recordings are stored on device. If you have iCloud backup enabled, they will also be backed up to iCloud as part of your regular backup. See also our privacy policy (ours is actually readable!):

https://tape.it/privacy

We're thinking a lot about how we will do this in the future when we start adding collaboration and sharing. Not FB or insta-like sharing, but rather within a close circle of friends (like your band our your choir). For that, we'll need to introduce accounts, and cloud storage.

It's not complicated on a technical level (or at least not rocket science), but we're very aware that not everyone wants their data scattered throughout the internet. We're currently contemplating whether we leave most data on-device and only put shared tapes on our cloud, or whether we just sync everything by default.

If we were to add some kind of Dropbox-like storage (on our own servers) that would make it trivial to share your recordings with friends, would that be something you'd welcome or would you rather be put off by having your recordings in yet another cloud?

Re: Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

#72
post #70
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome to hear! And thanks for the suggestion too, will try that today as well. Looping for my use case can be as simple as a toggle button (even in a hamburger menu somewhere :). I also know the challenges of looping mp3s seamlessly and am only thinking of wavs. Cheers!

Follow up assessment of Soundtrap Capture (and Soundtrap Studio): - Capture: Import was super easy but I see no way to loop, so that's out. - Studio: Full-blown collaborative DAW (overkill) but importing your own loops is gone (wtf?!). Looks like I'll wait for you guys to hopefully add importing audio files and looping.

Thanks for your feedback. I'll promise you we'll add it. No promise on the timeline, though (sorry, hope you understand that). But we'll add it. We always planned to.

If you sign up to our email newsletter on our website, you will also hear from us when the feature is out. There will likely be a few emails before that I'm afraid, as we have a few other features in the pipeline worth communicating, but I promise that we'll treat your inbox with respect.

Re: Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

#73
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they should. And they are already very worried about it. Only know that with certainty about Shure but I'd be surprised if the other companies weren't thinking in the same direction. My assumption is that we'll see the same development in the audio recording space as we saw it in the camera space. It's not 1:1 exactly the same - microphones have always been a lot more in the (semi-) professional area than camera…

Again, very little knowledge about audio, but some knowledge about photography.. From what I have read, it is important to have a physically large condenser/diphragm for a mic to have high fidelity. Could you educate me a bit please? At least for photography, I can tell you with certainty, an iphone camera is basically a toy when you are talking of challenging scenes being put on large fine art prints. It is nowhere…

You're absolutely right, and your photography analogy holds for audio, too.

However, if you look at the sales of consumer grade cameras as well as DSLRs, you'll see that smartphones ate a lot of their market. A quick Google gives you this continuously declining graph of DSLR sales, for example:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/799526/shipments-of-digi...

A phone will never replace a serious camera for large fine art prints. And the same is true for audio. But already, you have cases like Kanye claiming that 20% of the vocals from his last album were recorded in voice memos:

https://www.gq.com/story/inside-kanye-west-vision-for-the-fu...

Re: Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has fairly strong incentives to improve recording quality overall, including just better audio quality for the videos you shoot. Given the form factor of the iPhones, I'm frankly blown away by the sound quality you get from them. The SPL they can handle is absurd. Admittedly, your comment made me curious - I think I might have to annoy my neighbours with some bass playing this evening. In my experience, recordi…

Very cool! Just tried my bass into my iPhone 11 Pro max, recorded okay, but Tape It identified it as keyboards.

Ooops :D.

I'll take the version 1.0 excuse card if I may :D. All kidding aside, we know our instrument detection has room for improvement. But you gotta start somewhere :).

Re: Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

#75
post #52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High quality stereo recording is only available in our premium subscription (20$/year). The subscription comes with a one month free trial, which should give you some time to try it and see if you like it :)

So, I don't mind trials and subscriptions. And I will give this another go, however.. When I went to make my initial recording, the app asked me if I wanted to "try [Stereo HD]". I did this thinking that I could verify that stereo worked. If you're not going to let me try it without committing, you may want to rethink the onboarding flow a bit? But still, personally I'd consider giving users a proper taste of the pow…

Interesting. That is actually how the app works today: you actually have to tap try Stereo HD, then make a stereo recording that is at least 10 seconds long before pressing "try Stereo HD" again presents you with the paywall.

We got a lot of feedback from users (and from Apple in their App Review -.-) that that was confusing; they wanted to see the paywall straight away. So now we're considering removing that try-it-once-without-starting-a-trial mode.

Regarding exporting to mono: no, that shouldn't happen. It should definitely export to stereo. The exporting process doesn't touch the file. Would you mind sending me that audio file to thomas@tape.it if it's not a very private recording (of course we'll treat it privately; just for internal debugging)?

Re: Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

#76
post #63
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, sorry, my bad. Currently, you can do one recording in high quality stereo without having to subscribe or commit to anything. To do that, tap the "Try Stereo HD" button. It should then say "Trying Stereo HD" and the resulting recording should be in stereo. Sorry for the misunderstanding, I hope I could clarify :)

So, I'm now on the trial and I'm trying it out again! :) I have a silly question - does stereo recording work in both portrait and landscape orientations? I'll do more tests, but I'm hearing less stereo separation than I do when I shoot video (and I'm wondering if it needs to be held in landscape or something?)

We designed it to be used in portrait mode so that you don't have to rotate the app. Whether one should hold it in portrait or landscape can be configured in code.

Landscape mode would of course have much better microphone arrangement, with one being on the left and one on the right.

I will test this out myself to compare the difference again. Thank you so much for your feedback, it's super valuable!

Re: Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

#77
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed the parent was using the “try stereo” option. Does that button not record in stereo?

It didn't for me. The app does seem to imply that it will / did record in stereo. But, it didn't.

That might be a design problem - sorry for that.

The app has to say "trying Stereo HD" to record in stereo, and the background of the rectangle will change to solid blue. If it just says "try Stereo HD", it's meant as an encouragement to tap on it to enable that mode.

Clearly, if this is confusing, that's of course our fault, and we'll work on improving the UX to avoid this misunderstanding. I'd just be interested - did I describe the misunderstanding correctly?

Re: Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

#79
Note: requires iOS 14. I would have liked to give it a try, and pay if it proves superior to Apple's "Music Memos", but I can't, as I run an iPhone 6 / iOS 12 that is still very functional and security-patched by Apple (iOS 12.5.5 shipped last week).

As a developer, I can for sure understand you're limiting to the "latest and greatest" for API usage simplicity, but I urge you to reconsider requiring iOS 14. Two arguments for you to consider, one ethical, and one business:

1. I've met plenty of people sensitive ecologically and willing to keep their phone as long as possible. As a result, they run old iOSes.

2. Musicians are rarely making millions, and thus cautious with tech spending. By restricting to iOS 14, you're leaving money on the table.

Re: Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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,…

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 separ…

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 thomas@tape.it for a continued discussion :). I'll continue to check this thread, too, but in the long run email might be easier.

And again, thanks for your reddit suggestions!

Post reply on HN