SoundPrint, Find A Quiet Place 4+

Brilliant. I really hope it catches on and spreads wildly. I just found out about it, downloaded it, and already I love it. Restaurant noise levels are ludicrous. I'm one of those folks who already has an excellent noise level app (by Digital Six), but there's no crowdsourcing there. Now there is! A few months ago I met a friend at a restaurant/bar with good Yelp reviews in Midtown (NYC) for dinner where the noise level was over 90 dB! Borderline permanent hearing damage! We left. But there was no way to report this to others, apart from typing a note in Yelp that no one would ever get around to actually reading. I love this app.

The idea behind this app is an excellent one, and desperately needed. But it doesn’t measure accurately. Either it’s programmed to ignore human voice frequencies, or smartphone microphones can’t do the job. SoundPrint consistently “measured” a man yelling at the top of his lungs into a loudspeaker as quieter than an air conditioner. It repeatedly told me that the inaudible click of my home button was TWICE as loud as the man yelling into the loudspeaker! It’s clearly drastically off and miscalibrated, to the point of uselessness. The submissions also only record average decibels, not the maximum. This can help if it recorded you sniffling or sneezing at 90 dB, but it makes records of loud but intermittent noise totally useless. The restaurant ratings are a perfect example: “quiet “ restaurants are still way too loud for anyone with a sensitivity disability, which are the people who need this app the most. I don’t expect miracles from a free app, but I expect SOME functionality.

I gave the app only 3 stars because it runs on an iPad, but seem not to have been tested on one. The “start” button covers the line saying that samples must be at least 15 seconds. And if I try to submit with name and email, the pop up keyboard covers up the boxes I want to type in. Either fix the UI (probably straightforward) or mark the app as iPhone only.

I tried to get a top 10 list and it said there weren’t enough submissions. I would like to be able to request a top-10 list for another location than my current one.

Another location-related issue. I am in Mountain View, and I want to find a quiet restaurant in Palo Alto. I can’t set my location of interest in any way, so for every search I have to move the map from Mountain View Palo Alto again. This is going to be painful if I am looking for quiet restaurants farther away, like San Francisco.