Over the holidays, I stumbled across a very useful app for audiophiles, students and pranksters. iSaidWhat?! is an audio recorder, editor and mixer which can be used to record lectures or mix together recordings to create the illusion that someone said something they didn’t.
The first thing I noticed about the app was the icon. The icon was very clean and stood out from the rest of the pack. I immediately had high expectations of this app and I was not disappointed. I proceeded to open the app’s iTunes page and the next thing that struck me was the clean layout of the app. I knew exactly how to navigate around easily when I installed it. A nifty feature of this app is the input percentage meter, which allows you to choose how much the app can pick up. Although, this was not very intuitive. It should be there by default, rather than having to click the small grey microphone icon, which does not give a good indicator of its function. However, the feature is a bonus and not a necessity.
The next thing that caught my eye was the script feature, which puts a script for you to read from, which could be useful for song writers for example.
Now onto the main function of the app, which is the editor and mixer. I think it performs this function very well and it is very easy to use. It has two tabs, one for the recordings and one for arrangements of recording snippets. It’s very easy to cut bits out after a recording and easy to use it in arrangements.
Unlike some App Store reviewers, I disagree that the name is bad. I think it’s a unique name and will catch student’s eyes along with its icon that makes good use of the small square area. It could be improved to appeal to the songwriters though.
Complaints
The only complaints I have about this app are very minor. The first is that I should be able to delete a recording without deleting an arrangement that uses snippets from it.
The second is that the app should open to your list of recordings rather than the “New Recording” screen except on first launch. That’s it! Like, I said, these are not big deals and can be very easily fixed.
To sum up, I would recommend this app to pranksters, students and songwriters. For example, a student could use the arrangements feature to make one arrangement for a topic that was discussed in several lessons. This could be useful for many other purposes and I think at 99 cents, it’s a steal.
Update:
“The app opens in the recording screen on launch only if you didn’t close from within the snippets view, or arrangement view.”- my mistake
Also, as I suspected the developer says that “Arrangements aren’t seperate files, they actually read from the recording. Snippets are just shortcuts to a recording in order to conserve space and time.”
Ivana Isadora