Recommend an iPhone App for Recording Ambient Sound

February 15, 2013 9:29 AM

Is there a good app for recording actual unfiltered/ambient sound on the iPod? There's a chronically but intermittently reoccurring high-pitched sound that I'm trying to record, but all the sound recording apps aimed at recording voices or music seem to filter it out. Video recording captures it, but the resulting file is too large for my purposes (attaching to an e-mail).
posted by Lentrohamsanin to Technology (6 answers total)

Response by poster: Sorry, should be on the iPhone. 4s, specifically. Running ioS 6, unjailbroken. We also have a Touch with similar specs.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 9:32 AM on February 15, 2013

Best answer: You can rip the audio track from the video and compress it to an emailable filesize. Are you on a PC or Mac?
posted by griphus at 9:40 AM on February 15, 2013

Best answer: Following up on griphus' suggestion, I just checked, and the free audio software Audacity can pull out the soundtrack from a video. But it does require a computer.
posted by moonmilk at 9:46 AM on February 15, 2013

Oh, if you can do it through Audacity, then PC/Mac doesn't matter as it is cross-platform. I believe it can import .mov files natively as well. You'll just need to get an MP3 encoder (instructions here) and use it to convert the ripped audio.
posted by griphus at 9:51 AM on February 15, 2013

Have you tried an external mic? Might be worth hitting up a local music store to test one out.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:03 PM on February 15, 2013

Response by poster: Cool, I've used Audacity before.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 3:52 PM on February 15, 2013