Smart Recorder Lite - The Free Music and Voice Recorder 4+

Great idea for an app, but falls short of great. You can work around some problems that it has and it does work for what it's intended for, but without the workaround, it's almost useless.

As I understand it, (certainly what I intended to use it for anyway) you can press start at the beginning of an event and it will record audio of the event and you can type notes and those notes will get time-stamped with the proper time since the start of the event. Great idea for journalists or someone who wants to take meeting notes.

Problem is, when you press start, it starts to work as intended. When you type your first note (in the right side of the window), your note is added to the left and time stamped properly. After that, the time stamping no longer works in a usable way. If you press return, it simply returns to the next line, just like you'd expect a word processor to, but no new time stamp happens. Not only does no new time stamp happen, I can't find a way to reset it so that it does work properly again during that same session. If you press the "add tag" icon, it adds a new time stamp right then, but that is less than helpful when I'm trying to type notes in real time during an event. Their idea is when you're ready to start typing, that's the moment you must press the "add tag" icon. I don't want to have to remember or take time to click something before typing. I would much rather press some button that resets it to a "waiting for input" state so that when I do start typing again, it will then add a time stamp. OR better yet, if I press return two times in a row, it then resets to "waiting" status.

Workaround: I found that if you click on the first entry "START RECORD" after you have finished typing a note, then click back in the right side of the window, it will properly time stamp the next time you start to type.

I find this less helpful than it is valuable so I have uninstalled it. If development improves greatly, I'll try it again.

The 3-minute limit is not a problem for what I want to do: make sound bites for a children’s robot (Thymio).

The large selection of formats for saving the file is a HUGE PLUS for me. I needed the .wav format.

I would have rated the app even higher if (1) it would append the appropriate extension for the selected file format in the Save menu [and NOT hide the extension], and (2) it would allow the preferences to set the .wav format as the default for saving a file.

A nice touch for the children I have in mind would be if the keyboard shortcut for start/stop recording was simply the space bar, without the option key. Even if this could be set as an option in the preferences.

This is not an app, it's a crippleware demo. Apple, please stop allowing developers to upload crap like this.