Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Record Time: Audio Notes v1.0 Reviewed
Posted by Anjuan Simmons in "SOFTWARE" @ 08:00 AM
I tapped the name of the audio file with my stylus and held it long enough to bring up a context menu. It presented options to play the file, rename it, change its location from the storage card to main memory, delete it, or cancel and close the context menu.
Figure 11: The context menu for an audio file.
Figure 12: Options for the "Location" item in the context menu.
In order to test the delete functionality, I selected "Delete" from the context menu. I was presented with a request for confirmation of the deletion. This screen had both a "No" button on it as well as a "No" soft key. I assume that this redundancy is for users who don't have Windows Mobile 5.0 soft keys.
Figure 13: Audio Notes wants to know if I'm sure I want to delete an audio file.
I clicked the "Yes" softkey and the file was removed from the application and the storage card.
I then tried making a phone call with my PDA and recording the conversation using Audio Notes. However, I discovered that only my side of the conversation was recorded! If I turned on the speaker phone, I could record both sides of the conversation, but I would have preferred to have this functionality operate without the speaker phone in order to record audio conferences or interviews.
Having successfully created audio files with Audio Notes, I now wanted to see how the application performed when playing back recordings in both MP3 and WAV format. I also wanted to know how the three quality settings (low, medium and high) affected playback as well as file size. Therefore, I created six test audio files by recording the same four second phrase in all of the format and quality permutations in order to understand how each resulting audio file would sound and how large they would grow.
Figure 14: My six test audio files.
Figure 11: The context menu for an audio file.
Figure 12: Options for the "Location" item in the context menu.
In order to test the delete functionality, I selected "Delete" from the context menu. I was presented with a request for confirmation of the deletion. This screen had both a "No" button on it as well as a "No" soft key. I assume that this redundancy is for users who don't have Windows Mobile 5.0 soft keys.
Figure 13: Audio Notes wants to know if I'm sure I want to delete an audio file.
I clicked the "Yes" softkey and the file was removed from the application and the storage card.
I then tried making a phone call with my PDA and recording the conversation using Audio Notes. However, I discovered that only my side of the conversation was recorded! If I turned on the speaker phone, I could record both sides of the conversation, but I would have preferred to have this functionality operate without the speaker phone in order to record audio conferences or interviews.
Having successfully created audio files with Audio Notes, I now wanted to see how the application performed when playing back recordings in both MP3 and WAV format. I also wanted to know how the three quality settings (low, medium and high) affected playback as well as file size. Therefore, I created six test audio files by recording the same four second phrase in all of the format and quality permutations in order to understand how each resulting audio file would sound and how large they would grow.
Figure 14: My six test audio files.
