Apple’s latest iPhone occasion introduced some nifty concepts, from the digicam button to a reinvention of Google Lens and past. The corporate additionally introduced that it is bringing easy multitrack recording to Voice Memos. This was notably thrilling for me since, properly, I take advantage of Voice Memos lots. I’ve almost 500 of those little recordings that had been made through the lifetime of my iPhone 14 Professional and hundreds extra within the cloud. You by no means know while you’ll want a random tune you hummed whereas ready for the subway in 2013.
So this characteristic felt tailored for me. I write songs. I play guitar. I do all the things that woman within the industrial does, together with opening the fridge late at night time for no actual purpose.
Then actuality hit. This isn’t a software program replace that can hit all iPhone fashions. It’s tied to the ultra-premium iPhone 16 Professional, which begins at a cool $1,000. I don’t actually wish to improve proper now, so the dream of singing over an acoustic guitar observe proper on the Voice Memos app is useless on arrival.
Why is that this specific characteristic walled behind the iPhone 16 Professional? It’s a easy multitrack recording perform. From the advert, it seems to be just like the app can’t even layer greater than two tracks at a time. This may’t precisely be taxing that A18 Professional chip, particularly when the telephone can even deal with 4K/120 FPS video recording in Dolby Imaginative and prescient.
Professional Instruments, a well-liked digital audio workstation, was first launched in 1991. This was two years earlier than Intel launched the Pentium chip. Computer systems of that period had no hassle layering tracks. For a little bit of reference, final yr’s A17 Professional chip had round 19 billion transistors. An authentic Pentium chip had round three million. In different phrases, a contemporary smartphone chip is round 6,300 occasions extra highly effective than a 1993 Pentium-based PC.
So allow us to layer tracks on Voice Memos, Apple! It will possibly’t be that difficult. I’ve been utilizing devoted multitrack apps ever for the reason that iPhone 3. Apple throws GarageBand in with each iPhone. Each GarageBand and third-party recording apps have a spot, certain, however nothing beats the quickness and ease-of-use of Voice Memos. It’d certain be nice to have the ability to make a quick-and-dirty acoustic demo of a music and ship it out to somebody with out having to navigate a reasonably difficult interface.
Yeah. I see the elephant within the room. There’s part of the advert that I’ve been avoiding. The lady data the vocal layer over the guitar observe with out carrying headphones. She simply sang into the telephone whereas standing in entrance of that fridge. Now, that’s one thing old-school Pentiums couldn’t do. There’s some microphone placement wizardry happening there, together with machine studying algorithms that scale back undesirable ambient noise. The iPhone 16 Professional has a brand-new microphone array, so I get that older fashions won’t give you the chance deal with this specific a part of the equation.
However who cares? That’s a very neat characteristic. It’s additionally utterly pointless. In case you’re studying this, you might be seemingly already carrying earbuds/headphones or have some inside attain. Document the primary observe with out the headphones. Document the secondary layer whereas carrying headphones. That’s it. Downside solved. You may even do it in entrance of the fridge.
Additionally, each the base-level iPhone 16 and the Professional assist Audio Combine, which lets folks regulate varied sound ranges from varied sources after capturing video. That is performed with out the brand new Studio Mics on the iPhone 16 Professional and appears to scale back ambient noise in the same method. So it might be doable that there is a software program answer right here to deal with even that elephant within the room. In any case, the corporate credit “powerful machine learning algorithms” for this tech — if it may well erase environmental wind noise, certainly it may well deal with music taking part in within the background?
So I’m as soon as once more asking for Apple to let the remainder of us mess around with multitrack recording on Voice Memos. There’s no purpose each older iPhone mannequin couldn’t compute its solution to a easy guitar/vocal two-track wav file. Pop the characteristic right into a software program replace. I hear there’s one for iOS 18 coming actually quickly, and one other for Apple Intelligence after that.
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