I’m a journalist in a field where precision in quotes is paramount, so it’s very rare that I have an on-record conversation that isn’t literally recorded as well.
Typically I rely on a separate Sony IC unit which has served me reliably, and just turn to my phone as an emergency back-up. Today was one of those days where I had to rely on my emergency backup, and I’ve become convinced that the widget is not a sufficient substitute.
For one, having the audio files saved into a weird, hard-to-access partition may be a Google imposed problem for all Android devices, but there are ways around it. Yet I’m still left trying to hunt down files whenever I need to export them to transcription software or to share with an editor. The various share options do not offer the flexibility of simply being able to export an .mp3 to a laptop or drive via USB.
The “tap to record” automatic setting is theoretically handy, but it also means every time I try to access the app via the widget I’ve made a spurious recording of me fumbling with the phone for five seconds. Building up a pile of these interstitial ones and trying to sort through them led to me accidentally deleting the recording of an important interview.
I love the slick TP-7-esque recording interface, but between the ease of fat-fingering and the incredibly frustrating file storage “solution” I’ve just managed to delete 30 minutes of audio in seconds and spend an hour determining there’s no way to get it back even though it’s almost certainly sitting in the app’s cache.
If I were a developer I’d maybe be able to root the thing and access the cached data directly and get it back, but I’m just a layman and shouldn’t need to do that. Videos and photos I deleted weeks ago are showing up in the bin and various other places, and the scammy recovery tool I downloaded and paid for could find all of those just fine, but either it’s an issue with AAC being a weird format or the cache being inaccessible.
In any event, this piece of software is long on design, short on usability, and has cost me time, energy, and money today. Yes, user error is ultimately to blame, but good software should strive to make user error unlikely.
