I finally bought an iPhone 3G last week. And, one of the first things I downloaded and installed was the free Griffin iTalk voice recording app for the iPhone and second generation iPod touch. The next thing I did was download...
...for Mac OS X (works with Tiger or Leopard). An iTalkSync for Windows is also available though it wasn't when I prepared the screenshot above. I found it interesting at the time that the Mac version was released first.
iTalkSync lets you copy audio recording files from an iPhone or iPod touch (2nd gen.) using WiFi. There's no cables or any other software (iTunes, for example) needed. iTalkSync looks around for an iPhone or iPod touch with WiFi on and running iTalk. Although there isn't any password challenge, iTalk on the device asks you to approve the connection before any file transfer is allowed. You can see that iTalkSync found my iPhone (which I named tPhone) running iTalk.
You can see above what iTalk looks like on the iPhone after a connection is established with iTalkSync on the Mac.
Once I approved the csync onnection on the iPhone, iTalkSync displayed the audio recording files on my iPhone in a simple list. Each list item includes a filename, recording date, recording length (time), and file size.
You can also take a slightly closer look at a recording that adds recording quality information. I've been using the default 22.05 kHz recording format. The recording are in Apple's AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) file type. The 34 second sample recording I made for this blog entry was 1.4MB. So, I used the Open Source Audacity 1.3.6 (Beta) audio editor to convert it to an MP3 file. This shrunk it down to 272KB. I didn't modify the recording in any other way except for this audio file type conversion and compression.
I stood outside of my home to see how the iPhone and iTalk handled the relatively low-level ambient sounds around me: A jet engine in the distance, light breeze blowing, birds chirping, etc. I've made a couple of outdoor recording tests and have been surprised at how little ambient sound is actually heard in the recordings. You can hear an iTalk recording sample in the embedded Podbean player below. I think the sound quality is more than acceptable for a podcast. And, the simplicity of copying an audio file from an iPhone to a Mac makes it a painless process.
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thank you for this post.
Hi, Thanks for sharing this review. I am interested in using, my 2G iPod Touch using the same iTalk setup for lecture recording in a university environment and was wondering if anyone had tried this and what sort recording was the outcome. i.e. did it work well enough to be a practical means of reviewing a lecture at a later date?