Thursday, November 6, 2008

A Four Track Recorder For Your iPhone

Granted, this blog tends to be more about listening to music than recording it, but this was too cool to pass up: Wired Magazine is reporting that RiffWorks has released a four track recorder as an app for the iPhone and iPod touch. For those not in the know, a four track is a recorder that allows musicians to record 4 tracks of music completely separately, thus allowing the same musician to perform multiple takes or instruments at the same time. It was the most widely used format in professional studios during the sixties, and came to further prominence as the format of choice for home recording in the 80's and 90's (see: John Vanderslice's Life And Death Of An American Four Tracker). The fact that you can now fit this technology in your pocket is, well, awesome. What's more, the Wired review gives that app extremely high marks, given the limitations of the platform. This may be $10 we have to spend sooner rather than later....damn you app store!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The fact it records to 16-bit is awesome, but it's usefulness factor would go WAY UP with line-in capability.

hippiesaredead said...

Fair point, but how? Some sort of dongle? This has the nice advantage of being *ultra* simple.

It would be nice to see 16-bit be an option: sometimes 8-bit lo fi would be just fine, or even desired.

Anonymous said...

That is pretty damn cool. I'm with baytaper that line-in capabilities would be huge, but I'll likely pony up the $10 and give it a shot nonetheless.