iPhone 5 For Dummies, 6th Edition

Voice Memos

Consider all the times you’d find it useful to have a voice recorder in your pocket — perhaps when you’re attending a lecture or interviewing an important source (that’s a biggie for us journalist types). Or maybe you just want to leave yourself a quickie reminder about something (“Pick up milk after work”). Well, you’re in luck. Apple includes a built-in digital voice recorder.

A bunch of third-party apps add voice recording to the iPhone. Ed uses Recorder from Retronyms and Dictation from Dragon, and Bob uses iTalk Recorder from Griffin.

Making a recording

After you have that recorder in your pocket, how do you capture audio? When you tap the Voice Memos icon on the Home screen or in the Utilities folder, where it typically hangs out, up pops the microphone displayed in Figure 6-10. We’d tell you to talk right into that microphone, but it’s mainly for show. The two real microphones on the iPhone 4 and 4S are on the top and bottom of the device and the three microphones on the iPhone 5 are on the front, back, and bottom left (as pictured in Chapter 1).

Figure 6-10: Leaving a voice memo.

Tap the red record button in the lower-left part of the screen to start recording. You see the needle in the audio level meter move as Voice Memo detects sounds, even when you pause ...