[Athen] More on recording in class

[Deborah Armstrong]

Half a week ago in a post here I mentioned that "Heard" is only 32 bit. I stand corrected. There's now a 64-bit version that runs on newer iDEVICES.

I also tried out  Cogi and it's everything advertised. The description in part reads:

Cogi keeps the last few moments of audio buffered. When someone says something interesting, just tap the highlight button and Cogi backs up to capture
and save what was just said. When the moment has passed, just tap again and Cogi will stop highlighting.
You can have as many highlights in a session as you like.

I found it worked well with VoiceOver and also Talkback. Unlike some recording apps it did not mute the screen reader. It also doesn't have a lot of extraneous buttons in its interface. You do have to pay to have it record calls as phone calls are made through their server. It is free if you don't care about recording calls. It also has an integrated keyboard that lets you type in notes to correspond with your recordings if you wish. Sighted reviewers claimed the keyboard hides part of the interface but that's less of an issue for magnification or speech users.
Find Cogi here:
                https://cogi.com/

Heard
                http://www.heardapp.com/

Works a bit differently. It just saves the last buffer, which you can set for as little as 30 seconds or as long as five minutes. But it has no stop, start or pause so it's not as recorder-like as Cogi. I like both apps, each has its strengths.

I also really like RecUp
                https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/recup-record-to-the-cloud/id416288287?mt=8

Because its interface is so so simple. You can set it to record on startup and then when you no longer need it to record, press stop. Recordings are automatically downloaded to Dropbox and removed from your device, a great solution for people whose phones or tablets don't have a lot of memory. I know there's an equivalent for Android but I cannot remember that app's name. Rec Up is particularly good too for people who find technology challenging because there are few options and no onscreen clutter.

Moving on now to the advanced iDEVICE user, it's easy to create a shortcut that will start a recording and automatically stop after a particular length of time has passed. I have a siri shortcut "Do it" that records for ten seconds and another "Really do it" that records for an hour.
The single action for this shortcut is : "record audio".

One final point: if you use your phone or tablet to record the quality is just not going to be as good as with a digital recorder. Modern digital recorders filter out sounds like loud fans and can change the pickup pattern of their built-in microphones. They can also adjust the mic sensitivity. For example a city council meeting I recorded with both my iPHONE and digital recorder was clearer on the recorder because I was sitting in the back of the room. On the recorder I turned on the low-cut filter so it would not record the loud air conditioning unit, and I turned up the mic sensitivity and set its "zoom" level to high.

One advice I always give students is to practice by recording the television first. I suggest they try recording both with and without background noise both close to the television and from farther away.

--Debee

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