I came across two interesting new audio tools recently. One is a multitrack digital audio workstation for Windows and Mac, while the other is a mobile app designed for the iPhone and iPod touch. Both tools were designed with journalists in mind, which means that they give you the tools you need to produce radio news stories without all the bells and whistles you get with tools built for musicians.

Monle four track mobile audio recorder

Monle (pictured above) is a four track digital audio editor and recorder for the iPhone and iPod touch. You can use it to record audio using the iPhone's built in mic, a headset mic, or a higher quality external mic like the Blue Mikey or Alesis Pro Track.

The app isn't quite as powerful as a desktop multitrack digital audio workstation. For instance, you can't undo most actions. But you can drag and drop files on the timeline to arrange them, split audio files, and mix down a session to a WAV file that you can export -- and then upload to your newsroom's FTP site from within the app itself.

For more screenshots and a video overview, you can check out my review of Monle at mobiputing.

Monle is available from the iTunes App Store for $9.99.

Hindenburg Journalist Beta

This app is available as a free download for Windows and Mac computers while it's still in beta. Eventually the developer will start charging, but word on the street is that it will sell for around $50, which makes it pretty cheap for a digital audio workstation.


Hindenburg Journalist has an intuitive and easy to use interface for anyone who has ever spent time working with audio on a computer. I'm guessing it wouldn't take long to pick up if you've never edited a WAV file in your life. Basically you can use Hindenberg to record or import tracks, arrange them on a timeline, adjust the volumes, add fads, and split tracks.

It's a non-destructive editor, which means that you can make all the changes you like to the sound files in your timeline without affecting the source audio stored on your hard drive. This also means that if you crop a file and then later decide you didn't mean it, all you have to do is grab the edge of the file and pull to restore the missing audio.

You can adjust volumes either by adjusting the volume of the whole track or by grabbing the little rectangle at the top of an individual file and pulling it up or down. To add a fade, just grab the square at the top edge of the file and pull it toard the center.

Hindenburg Journalist has basic features such as cut, paste, save, and export. But there are no digital effects. There are no compression or filter options. And you can only save project files or export your audio as WAV files. If you want an app that saves to MP3, AAC, FLAC, or another media format, you'll either need an external app or a more complex digital audio editor.

Update: A new version has just been released that adds the ability to export audio as an MP3. Apple users can also export files as AAC and Apple Lossless. 

To be honest, for my needs, Hindenburg Journalist does 90% of everything I'd ever need a desktop audio editor to do. An equalizer would be handy, since I occasionally need to edit phone tape, which usually requires reducing the high and low frequencies to eliminate extraneous noise.

The team behind Hindenburg Journalist also offers a mobile app for the iPhone and iPod touch. It costs $29.99, although there's a free version that limits recordings to 1 minute.

Update: I just heard from the developers of Hindenburg journalist, and eventually the software will have pretty much every feature on my wish list, including:

• Export to MP3
• Equalizer
• Compressor
• Support for third party plugins

via Jeff Towne

I've just launched a new web site covering smartphone applications. As a sister site to Liliputing, the new site is called mobiputing. But while both blogs cover the mobile computing space, my aim is to make mobiputing a resource for people looking for software tips and recommendations for their phones, not a site for news, information, and rumors about upcoming hardware.

Long before I purchased my first netbook, I was using PDAs and handheld PCs running Windows Mobile or EPOC (the precursor to Symbian). I spent hours downloading and trying new applications for these devices, and tinkering to see if I could install alternate operating systems on older devices after the sheen started to wear off.

But after a while I started to find the whole experience a bit frustrating. Because there were fewer and fewer apps that would run on the devices I was using, and the experience of downloading applications to a desktop and then syncing them to a PDA was a bit cumbersome.

The problem wasn't that the market for mobile apps was stagnating -- it was just moving to a new area: smartphones. I held out for a long time, carrying an aging PDA and a cellphone with two special features: an LED flashlight and the ability to remember a few of my friends' phone numbers. But recently I broke down and picked up a Google Nexus One smartphone running Android 2.1 and a 3rd generation iPod Touch. And wow... all the excitement I experienced when purchasing my first PDA 10 years ago was back.

There are thousands of amazing apps for smartphones like the iPhone, Nexus One, and other Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm, and Symbian devices. My hope is that mobiputing will be a place for people to learn about new apps and to share their experiences and ideas about the mobile marketplace.

There are literally billions of mobile phones out there, and a growing number of these phones are running smartphone operating systems capable of running applications that entertain us, connect us with one another, or make us more productive.

Every now and again I look around my office and wonder why I haven't gotten rid of all the cardboard boxes littering the place.

I got my first chance to see the Sony PCM-M10 in person last week at a store in New York. The handheld recorder is significantly smaller than its more expensive siblings, the PCM-D50 and PCM-D1. But it has the same large buttons, vivid backlit display, and the ability to record in 96kHz/24-bit stereo audio.

The PCM-M10 has been available since this summer with a list price of $399, but you can now get it for as little as $290 from Amazon.

The folks at Wingfield Audio have posted one of the first reviews of this digital audio recorder that I've seen.The recorder is clearly not quite as full featured as the larger, more expensive models in the series. For instance, the Divide button has been replaced with a T-Mark button.

But Wingfield reports that the new model is just as easy to use as its predecessor, and includes a couple of features missing from earlier models including the ability to record in MP3 format and a built-in speaker for monitoring recordings.

The PCM-M10 also reportedly runs for more than 40 hours on a pair of AA batteries and Wingfield says the audio recording quality is almost as good as what you would expect from the Sony PCM-D50 even though the updated model has smaller, cheaper microphones. You can hear audio recordings and judge for yourself at WingField's recorder noise test page.

Another major update is support for microSD flash media cards. The Sony PCM-D50 only took Sony Memory Stick media. The PCM-M10 also has 4GB of built in storage space though, so you might never need to use removable storage.

Like other Sony recorders though, the PCM-M10 lacks XLR inputs and phantom power. You can only plug in an external mic using the 1/8th inch jack. Still, for $290, if I was in the market for a digital audio recorder today I would seriously consider this one.

I mean seriously... if you were going to name this thing, would you have gone with Yeti, or would you have picked everyone's favorite droid? You know... up until recently. On the other hand, I suppose R2D2 didn't talk, which would make it a strange name for a microphone...

Just got around to listening to the podcast of this week's On The Media, and wow... what a great example of public radio reporting. This week's entire show is devoted to an examination of the music business during the 10 year anniversary of the launch of Napster.

NPR reporter Rick Carr guests hosts and gets some amazing quotes, including one from former RIAA head Hilary Rosen who admits that the heads of the music labels may have sued Napster into oblivion... but they also thought it was kind of cool and she laments that 10 years later nobody has come up with a music distribution system that works as well as Napster did.

Aviary just launched a web-based audio editing application called Myna, and it's honestly the first one I've tried that I would actually consider using. It's free, works from any web browser, and lets you upload, record, edit, and mix audio in multitrack sessions. I've written up a more detailed overview for Download Squad.