Floating audio widget for recording comments in OS X

March 31, 2016 6:26 PM

I'm responding to student papers that are stuck inside our school's LMS. The software has a recording feature, but it is clunky and sluggish. What I would like to do is leave audio comments as a read the paper, hitting record and pause until I reach the end, then save the recording as an mp3. Quicktime would work perfectly for this if I could get the recording window to stay in the foreground.

I have and use Audacity, but the limited screen real estate of my macbook forces me to switch back and forth between the student paper and the recording.

I'm looking for some sort of floating widget that will stay on the surface of whatever browser window I'm using and let me record comments in a discrete file.

posted by mecran01 to Technology (5 answers total)

If you have a smartphone, you could use something like RØDE Rec to do this and then upload the resulting mp3s from the phone.
posted by Miss T.Horn at 6:57 PM on March 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Using my phone makes sense, but I'm also trying to justify the fancy usb microphone I bought, which also sounds a little better. Using the phone also adds another step because I have to transfer the file, which cuts into the time savings.
posted by mecran01 at 9:01 PM on March 31, 2016

If your OS version is at least Yosemite, you can go to System Prefs / Keyboard and define some global app shortcuts (that work from any app) to the menu items in Audacity's Transport menu i.e. Record, Pause, etc. I'd have one shortcut for Record and one to Pause / unpause. Haven't tested it though. See apple support page here.
posted by yoHighness at 9:58 AM on April 1, 2016

Response by poster: yoHighness Thank you, that looks like a possibility. Audacity doesn't show up in the list of apps, so you need to click "other." It appears to work, but the new shortcuts attached to the Audacity functions don't seem to work unless Audacity is in the foreground. I'm probably doing something wrong.

However, I was just playing with Quicktime, and found one can go to View | Float on Top, which puts the little audio-recording widget in front of the papers I'm responding too, so that should solve the problem. Thanks everyone!
posted by mecran01 at 10:40 AM on April 1, 2016

Response by poster: It turns out that you can't pause and then resume with the Quicktime recording widget--just make a single, one-shot recording.
posted by mecran01 at 6:10 AM on April 3, 2016