[App Fridays] Sky Recorder - A beautiful sound recorder

This Column is sponsored by Nokia Asha

It will be interesting to know how many people use their phones for audio recording. In the field of journalism, where a large part of your day involves interviewing people, a sound recorder has always been a journalist's best friend. However, sound recorder apps on smartphones have the potential to replace these devices, and have done so to a large extent as well.

Today's App Friday is one that I have used extensively ever since its closed beta stage. Sky Recorder is a simple app with which you can make high quality audio recordings, which can be later shared through various channels. Having used the app for several months, here's the review of Sky Recorder -

What is it about? 

Sky Recorder is recorder app. But unlike most recorder apps which sport a bot red record button and a list of recordings, it has been designed in a way which makes this recording app feel like a lot more. This is a two page app. The first page is the record screen. While not recording, the app gives you information about the number of recordings made and the number of recordings available based on the space used and the space available. When recording, the same page shows a waveform animation and a clock which shows the duration of the recording.

The second page shows a list of recordings, in the top half of the screen. The bottom portion of the screen has the play/pause, forward/rewind and the back/next functions. The elements on the list can be renamed, deleted and shared using various applications on long press. If you have a long list, there's a search feature which you can use to find older recordings.

Sky Recorder provides the user with a lot of options. There are a couple of themes that you can choose from, alter the font size, change the recording quality and format. You can even choose how you want the ads on the app to show up!

Sky Recorder can sync with DropBox, which uploads all the recordings over a WiFi network to a DropBox folder of your choice.

What is simple? 

The first thing that strikes you about Sky Recorder is that it is really simple. The focus of the app is on recording and playback. But once you get through the good looks of the app, it is no more than a recording app. I will keep coming back to this app because I am a journalist, but for other users to keep coming back to the app, Sky Recorder will definitely need more features.

For example, photo/social tagging recordings is something that will make sorting and finding recordings in sound cloud really easy. If the app could also transcribe recordings to text, then it would be a first of its kind on a smartphone.

Because it is a well designed app, the ideas to build upon Sky Recorder are endless. But it might come at the cost of the app's simplicity. The maker of the app made it with the intention of keeping it simple and easy to use. Given that the app has recently launched, it will be interesting to see how it adds features to it, without affecting the app's simplicity.

Pros and cons

Sky Recorder is a very good utility app. You can record, playback and sync with it, and it does it very well. It is simple and easy to use, which keeps you coming back to the app. Furthermore, its good design makes Sky Recorder pleasing to the eye.

The app is still in a public beta, and understandably, there are some bugs in the app. For example, while recording in high bit rates, the audio skips a fraction of a second at regular intervals. Also, I feel that the app should prompt you to name your recording. Renaming the default date and time stamp is the only off thing in this very easy to use app.

Our take 

With great design and simplicity, Sky Recorder stands out from the regular recorder apps in the market. However, in its current form, it has a very niche population which will contribute to the apps active user population. It definitely needs a lot more features that will cater to a wider audience.

There are two version of SkyRecorder - Free and Paid. The free version is ad-supported and the paid one gets rid of the ads. There are no additional features in the paid app. Give both a spin and tell us what you think.

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