iPhone iTalk Application: A Great Event Recorder

This evening our son bridged up from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts and earned his Arrow of Light Award. Before the ceremony began, however, I realized it might be wonderful to audio-record the event to share it with grandparents as well as archive it for our own enjoyment later. The problem was I had forgotten to bring my Olympus WS-110 portable digital audio recorder to the ceremony!

I remembered that I’d installed the free Griffin iTalk application on my iPhone, however, and although I had not used it before tonight I thought it might be able to save the day. It did work to record the ceremony, and with some amplification in Audacity the resulting final recording (which I uploaded to edublogs.tv) is pretty reasonable. Most of this recording was made from my seat in the 2nd row of the church sanctuary where this ceremony was held.

iTalk is very easy to use on an iPhone, simply press the record button to start and stop the recording process. Files can be named as desired. This is how recordings look on the iPhone after they have been saved:

To transfer recorded iTalk audio files to your computer, it is necessary to download and install the free iTalk iSync application.

To transfer files, open the iTalk application on your iPhone and then open the iTalk iSync program on your computer. Both your iPhone and computer must be connected to the same WiFi network. The iTalk iSync application scans the network and finds any iPhones which are connected and running iTalk. After double clicking the name of the iPhone, a confirmation prompt is displayed on the iPhone:

If you click YES to this prompt, the iPhone and the computer are connected and ready for transfers:

It is then possible to drag audio files from the iTalk iSync application to different locations on your computer’s hard drive. The files (in AIFF format) copy over to your computer relatively quickly, about as fast as they would with a wired, direct USB connection.

It is FANTASTIC to have this type of recording ability on my iPhone, wherever I go. I almost called Gabcast and used its recording functionality tonight for the ceremony, but it proved even easier to use the iTalk application since it didn’t require a phone call which could potentially be “dropped” or otherwise interrupted.

Have you had positive or negative experiences using the iTalk iPhone application, or just the built-in speakerphone recording option on a different cell phone model?

Technorati Tags:
italk, isync, iphone, audio, audacity, podcasting, record

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes’ free newsletter. Check out Wes’ video tutorial library, “Playing with Media.” Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..

• The Council of Constance and Modern Web – 2021
• American Revolution Videos from Schoolhouse Rock and Discovery United Streaming – 2014
• Hacker Cases Highlight Need for Greater Personal Account and Information Security – 2014
• Cross Examination Debate Flow Template for Numbers in iWork ’09 – 2012
• Teach Your Students to be Digital Artists (and learn from Kevin Honeycutt) – 2012
• Blog comment moderation: How and Why? – 2010
• Crescent Public Schools: The Eyes of Oklahoma Are Upon You! – 2010
• Present at OSSBA in August 2010 – 2010
• eDiscovery requirements and archiving student email – 2010
• Comparing Broadband USB Options for Laptops – 2009