If Meeting-Recorder were just a simple audio recorder, it would scarcely be worth mentioning. There are, after all, plenty of those kinds of apps to choose from on the App Store, and Apple’s own Voice Memos also does the job perfectly well.
Meeting-Recorder, however, goes way beyond merely recording memos, notes, or snippets of that song idea that’s been lurking in your head for weeks. It allows you to contextualise your recordings in a way that captures much more than just the audio of a meeting.
Multiple options
You can, of course, name and tag recordings, and they are then time- and date-stamped. That’s the least you might expect. But you can also add text notes, photographs, and star ‘ratings’, to allow you to capture as much of the meeting as possible, and find the recording again easily afterwards.
When you’re done, you can share the audio in a variety of ways – including sending it to Dropbox, or storing it as a note in Evernote. You can also create a PDF from the visual materials associated with your recording, and share those.
There’s also an option to create a video that displays photos as the audio plays, but sadly the app crashed every time we tried to do this. Did we mention that recordings can be shared with iCloud too, thus making a recording you create on an iPhone easily available in the iPad app? It also removes the recording from your iPhone or iPad when you bump it over to iCloud, thus freeing up precious storage space on your device.
Operational features
The first stage in recording is to tap the big red button near the top of the screen; no surprises there. What happens next, however, is unusual. You’re presented with the option to record your audio in either MP3 or AAC format.
The maximum recording length is dependent only on the storage space available on your device, and recordings can be paused and re-started as necessary. When it comes to finding recordings again, you have several options. The first is what Meeting-Recorder calls Timeline, a chronological list of all the recordings you’ve stored. Handily, if you’ve added photos to a recording, a thumbnail is displayed next to the recording name, making it much easier to pick out.
You can also view recordings in a calendar and tap on the date to find a recording, use tags, or search for it by name. The search function has a several options. You can, for example, search only those recordings with photos, or only those with memos attached, or you can search between specific dates. It’s remarkably powerful.
Once you’ve found a recording, as well as playing it back at normal speed, you can slow it down to as little as half-speed or increase playback rate up to two times the normal speed. If you choose to share it, you can create a zip archive before despatching it to Dropbox, for example.
Meeting-Recorder has been exceptionally well thought through. It’s chock-full of brilliant features that lift it easily above a standard voice recorder. Its user interface - while not entirely aesthetically pleasing - is well designed. Accessing features is easy and finding recordings - thanks to the use of thumbnails and the date and time stamp - couldn’t be simpler.
Our only issue with it is that the video function didn’t work for us. That’s hardly a deal-breaker, but it’s frustrating if you particularly wanted to create photo slideshows of your meetings. As a tool for capturing the nuts and bolts - as well as the spirit - of a meeting, Meeting-Recorder is an excellent companion app.
You'll find this review, and many more, in Tap! Magazine issue 29.
Key info
- Works with: iPhone, iPod, iPad
- Price: $1.99/£1.49
- Version: 1.0.1
- App size: 3.3MB
- Developer: Lin Fei
- Age rating: 4+
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