Synchronize Your Lecture Notes and Audio Recordings With the Noted App
iOS: As a reporter, I end up taking a lot of notes almost everywhere I go. The great thing about audio tapes is that they don’t miss anything, but one thing has been true for me pretty much across the board: the part of the interview that I want to find is always the part where I paid so much attention to the person speaking that I failed. to write the time code.
If you are like me and often record interviews, or if you find yourself recording meetings or school lectures for later reference, the Noted app is well worth a try.
At first glance, Noted looks like a regular note-taking app, but there are some pretty useful bells and whistles. Notably, you can record audio and take notes in one place, and they sync for collaboration.
When you enter notes in the app while recording audio, they instantly get a time-coded time stamp from your audio at that moment. This means that I can type something as simple as “great quote!” And that will be the time when I can come back later without having to include additional information at this point.
Audio is recorded with noise canceling to help eliminate some of the annoying background noise that usually accompanies interview recordings. The app claims that it also makes this recording in an energy efficient way, so you don’t drain your battery.
The note taking app element is a rich text editor with formatting tools and options (if you want to get serious with these notes). You can highlight parts of your notes, take snapshots, and pin important items from your notes to the top of the page.
It’s a decent option for just good notes, but the sound feature really pushes it to the edge.
When it’s time to watch the audio later, you can jump directly to the audio snippets associated with your notes. You can also speed up and slow down the recordings you are trying to preview by up to 0.5x, 1x, 1.5x, etc., etc.
You can also share everything with friends in class or colleagues as PDF or .txt file, and audio as .m4a format.
One drawback: it all has to happen on the iPad or iPhone. If you’re used to taking notes on a laptop, like me, then a little tweak (and possibly an external keyboard) is required to make the Noted worthwhile. And if you are a purely Android user, you are SOL.
The app offers a free trial and some limited free use, but you’ll also have to pay for it if you want to use it on a very regular basis. Subscriptions cost a dollar a month or $ 9 a year, which is pretty on par with other, less feature-rich audio recording apps.
Before I found Noted, I was a huge fan of Recordium, which I still recommend if you are looking for something for audio recording but don’t need the notes feature. It doesn’t let you take notes, but it does highlight portions of the audio you’ve recorded, which can make it a little easier to find those important snippets, assuming you didn’t forget to hit that highlight button first.