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There's An Audio App For That
(Live Design Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Need to edit an audio file, but you don’t have your
computer with you? Need some pink noise, but don’t have your
noise-plug? Think you know the frequency that’s feeding back,
but can’t seem to squash it? Don’t worry. You guessed
it: There’s an app for that.
I’m right up there in sound dork-dom, but even I didn’t
have some of the best new audio-centric apps on my phone, as it
turns out. In general, my “app-etite” is a little
lackluster. I’m pretty pleased that my phone emails, sends
texts, takes pictures, browses the web, and, oh yeah,
usually makes phone calls. My most handy apps are probably
BrewHop and Facebook, but it turns out, with a bit of research and
purchasing, my iPhone (or iPad, if I had one) could be a fairly
useful audio companion in my pocket.
In my research, which honestly came far from encompassing all audio
apps, I ended up with three that I really liked and had generally
good reviews. These three are new or have been updated in the last
year. Each accomplishes a different task, and there were easily
other contenders that could do the same thing, just possibly not as
well, as quickly, or as sleekly, in my opinion. Your own experience
may vary, of course. All are available at the Apple App Store.
Performance Audio’s Audio
Tool
A versatile six-part app, Audio Tool has been developed by Performance Audio. Audio
Tool greets you with a very forward disclaimer: “Performance
Audio has made every effort to make this application as accurate
and reliable as possible. However, this application is supplied for
entertainment purposes only.” Fair enough, I actually
appreciate that. I mean, this is your phone we’re
talking about. It’s a tool, as its name suggests, but
doesn’t claim to be a professional audio device...yet.
That said, it does very well. Part one is a thorough decibel meter,
Decibel Meter Pro 2. Using the microphone on your phone as a
measurement mic, it measures the dB of incoming audio, and it does
so with fairly remarkable accuracy. Its layout is easy to read and
displays a lot of information cleanly. Centered around a wheel, it
displays the average dB with both a moving needle and a large
numerical readout. There’s also a peak needle and readout
display, as well as a maximum dB meter. Taking this little app into
real-world usability is the inclusion of the four most common
weighting filter options: dBA, dBB, dBC and dBZ. Control options
keep your phone from sleeping, adjusting the mic sensitivity, and
calibrating the mic.
Part two is Microphone Pro. It’s a basic little app that
turns your phone into a microphone. Whatever your onboard mic picks
up is routed to the headphone jack. There’s an on/off button
and a volume control fader. In my brief test, it worked pretty
well. What I heard in my headphones sounded clean and fairly
accurate. Obviously, the sound is only as good as the mic on your
phone, but the app didn’t seem to degrade the signal. There
was noticeable latency, but for less-than-critical applications, it
should be okay. So next time you’re short a mic on a gig,
whip out your phone and adaptor cable. Comments I saw included
people using the app as a talkback mic, and I can imagine that
working pretty well.
Part three is Tone Generator Pro, and it’s actually pretty
great for a tone generator. All audio feeds either through your
built-in speaker or, if a cable is connected, your headphone jack,
which clearly you could connect to a sound system. It will play
sine, square, sawtooth, reverse sawtooth, and triangle waves at any
volume and frequency. There are buttons for your go-to frequencies,
or you can select frequencies with an overly sensitive virtual
fader or an up/down button that skips to frequencies incrementally.
On my phone, it showed me that the frequency response of the
onboard speaker was from about 160Hz to 15kHz and that my dog has
good hearing. Tone Generator Pro also has a noise section that
plays pink or white noise with adjustable volume and a sweep
section that allows you to smoothly sweep through frequencies in
three sections (2Hz to 200Hz, 20Hz to 2kHz, and 200Hz to 20kHz),
using a pretty smooth and controllable jog wheel.
Part four is the straightforward Tempo Pro. It’s a slick
metronome that easily lets you set your tempo (complete with the
tempo markings), volume, and time signature. It has different user
settings, including sounds, screen flashing, sleep control, and
more. The only thing I noticed is that, when my phone went to
sleep, the metronome continued (good), but the tempo stuttered for
a moment (not so good).
Rounding out the tools are parts five and six: Bit Calc Pro and
Audio Atlas. These are handy, if not as application-oriented. Bit
Calc Pro lets you plan your next recording session. You tell it
about your session: how many tracks you’re going to record,
at what bit depth and sample rate, etc. Your next move depends on
what you know or don’t know. If you know you need to record
for 30 minutes, it will tell you how much hard drive space you
need. Or, if you know you only have 1GB of space on your drive, it
will tell you how long you can record. With this tool, I now know
that, if I’m recording in stereo at 16-bit and 96k, and I
only have room for 250MB, I’m limited to 11:22 of
recording good to know.
Finally, Audio Atlas completes the package. Audio Atlas is a very
complete collection of audio terms, sorted alphabetically. You look
up a term, and it will tell you about it or give you a definition.
I was pleased to find that it’s really quite complete. It
even had a definition and description for “tape
bias” sort of funny, if you think about it.
Alex Wiltschko’s Octave
Octave from developer Alex
Wiltschko is a realtime analyzer (RTA) for your iPhone. Using
your onboard speaker, Octave displays a realtime graph showing the
incoming frequencies and their SPLs. Octave uses ANSI-certified
time-domain analysis instead of Fast-Fourier Transform (FFT)
techniques. The results are quite consistent with what I see with
other more professional RTAs.
Sitting by my computer, I see my room tone peaks around 250Hz and
that most of my whistling is between 1kHz and 2kHz. You can pick
the bandwidth (1/3, 1/6, or 1/12 octave) and the time decay/graph
speed. It also shows you a trace of the maximum curve, which can be
reset by triple tapping the display. If you turn on “show
maximum,” a bar across the top of the display will constantly
show you the peak signal in frequency, amplitude (in dB), and
note.
There are several other RTA apps out there, but this one seemed the
most useful and user-friendly. Wiltschko also developed two other
great apps: Fourier, an easy FFT analyzer, and oScope, a simple and
powerful oscilloscope. All of his work has a clean and easy-to-use
look to it very “appy” apps.
TwistedWave Audio Editor
Okay, now this is getting crazy. TwistedWave lets you edit
audio waveforms on your phone. Granted, this looks much easier and
better on an iPad, but still, the app is pretty great, even on your
phone.
The TwistedWave app is based on, and extremely similar to, the
company’s full-fledged audio editor for Mac. Both the
computer and app versions let you do fairly comprehensive editing
of either mono or stereo tracks. It won’t do multiple tracks
beyond stereo, so this is all in-line editing, like Bias’
Peak or Digidesign’s Sound Designer II. Think: voiceover
artists or hopeful voice over artists. There are other
apps that allow for multiple tracks, but what they gain in more
tracks, they lack in completeness.
It’s very easy to get around the TwistedWave app. You can
create a new document and then record into the program using the
onboard mic on your phone, or you can import audio from your iTunes
on your phone, from an email attachment, or via iTunes file sharing
from your computer. Most common formats are supported, including
MP3, WAV, and SD2.
You can see your waveforms via an overview screen along the top,
and then you zoom-in and edit in the main display. Using standard
drag, pinch, and tap gestures, you can select portions of the audio
and do a number of processes. Without leaving the main screen, you
can copy and paste a selection, and have multiple levels of undo
and redo. Or, with the selection highlighted, you can go to the
effect screen and select a bunch of configurable DSP effects,
including amplify, normalize, fade-in, fade-out, silence (i.e., cut
the audio but preserve the time), insert silence (i.e., add time),
EQ filters (high- and low-pass, and shelf), delay (with parameters
to control), compression (with parameters to control), and pitch
and speed change. Each of these effects can be instantly previewed
and/or applied really quite impressive.
And then, when you’re on-the-go masterpiece is done, you can
easily export your work and pick a format, including Advanced Audio
Coding (AAC) compression for smaller files. You can email it, send
it to a Dropbox, send it to your iTunes, or send it to any FTP
site crazy, just crazy. TwistedWave could be a
lifesaver.
The world of apps is really amazing, and to be sure, there are
other great and not-so-great audio-focused apps out there. These
three apps were easy to find, relatively cheap to purchase, easy to
use, and definitely serve a purpose. Beyond messing around with
them, I can see myself actually using them in my work. I’d
love to see more manufacturers of gear producing their own apps.
Yamaha has an impressive app that lets you manipulate some common
monitor mixing controls on the M7CL console. I like that idea and
hope other manufacturers go down the app road. For now, these three
apps show that developers are doing great work in the audio world
and that, indeed, there is an app for that.
© 2012 Penton Media
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