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Show HN: Tape It – iOS recording app for musicians

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

#111

Post by comboy »

earthnail wrote: post #22
comboy wrote: post #21

It would be great if you stated right away what's advantage of using it over say GarageBand. Is it just about cleaner UI?

Hi Comboy, It's not trying to compete with GarageBand. GarageBand itself is an instrument in a way; it comes with lots of built-in sounds, loops and more. You should rather think of it as a replacement for Voice Memos :-).

I see. I like it. For me the killer feature would still be multi tracking though.

When I have musical idea in my head and I'm trying to use my voice to save it I need to put parts that are supposed to be on top of each other one after another. It would be nice to record them properly.

I'm guessing it's very non-trivial to add it UX-wise without destroying current simplicity.

Also, stereo HD is not doing it for me. Maybe add some filters as paid option?

Where voice memo strongly wins with you is data synchronization and backups. I often even use my watch for recording. That's just fireworks, but moving data from phone to macOS seems like a really useful feature. So I'd love to have it backed up and synchronized (preferably icloud, would be nice to avoid having any account associated with the app).

I hope any feedback helps, I'll try using it for a longer time, it does feel better than voice memos. Thanks and good luck.

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

#112

Post by Bud »

earthnail wrote: post #107
Bud wrote: post #101

As a professional classical musician for the last 30 years, my first question would be, is this superior to the built-in app on the iPhone for recording, and if so, can you explain how and prove that? Also, as others have said, I would never consider paying until I could try it out in a full-featured way, and I definitely would not pay for yet another subscription service for something that is so dead simple. Especia…

Hi Bud, Thanks for your feedback. You can try the entire app for free. In fact, we give away almost the entire app for free, with the exception of the Stereo HD quality. If you are happy with the recording quality that, say, Apple's Voice Memos provides you, our app sounds exactly the same in its free version. As I'm sure you agree, the best way to compare audio quality is just to listen to it. We have a listening ex…

Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful response! I think you are doing a great job. I hope you succeed, even if I had some reservations, as I expressed earlier.

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

#114

Post by n_sonic »

earthnail wrote: post #75
n_sonic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Hey again.

So, after doing a few more tests, it seems like I was incorrect, my initial recording was in stereo (I'm happy to admit when I'm wrong!)

I feel like the issue was more to do with a lack of stereo separation than anything being wrong.

For example, I tried making sounds on either side of the sound field, but I really couldn't hear any change positioning in the stereo image (and I'm using studio monitors).

Sounds like this might be more of a limitation of using the portrait orientation microphone positions that anything else.

So, I'd would definitely consider offering some flexibility there if that's possible. It would also be great if the UI showed twin level meters or similar to confirm the stereo (would help to push the idea of the additional value offered by stereo as well?)

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

#115

Post by JoshuaEddy »

earthnail wrote: post #80
JoshuaEddy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Emailed.

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

#116

Post by earthnail »

nomatikco wrote: post #100

Based on the comments, it looks like you’ve picked a good problem to solve. And as you’ve discovered, building a product is only part of the work, getting it noticed is just as important. I have a few suggestions to consider: - As the musical community is very relationship driven I would prioritize sharing and virality over advertising for discovery. Make it easy to send files to friends and you have a built in promo…

Thanks a lot for the kind advice. Indeed, sharing is the number one thing we're working on right now. Getting it right will take some time, though.

I like the idea of going to where your customers are. We're already trying to do that, but your comment confirms us in this. Music schools and universities etc. are what we have our main eye on right now. Gigs and open mic nights, too, but it scales less well, and it's always a fine line between asking an artist about their workflow and annoying them with self-promotion - in particular on an evening that should be all about them, not us.

Reddit we found quite tricky though - the music-related subreddits we found do not allow self-promotion. Apparently they get enough spam already, which I can totally understand. If you have good suggestions for subreddits or other online music forums, I'd greatly appreciate it! Same goes for music blogs etc.

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