Sorry to hear about the meetings. I used to go that route too and still recall the feeling of time "wasted" instead of time "spent", but maybe that was the kind of sprawling, minimal agenda meetings I used to attend. Nowadays I figure everyone is so distracted by all of their mobile electronics that they're not paying attention anyway and in fact, perhaps that's why you need to record the meetings too: to ensure you can later review what happened in case you were distracted by Angry Birds, Farmville or Words with Friends.

No comment? :-)

Be that as it may, turns out that the Apple iPhone has a built in audio recording app called Voice Memos, which I think most people just ignore in favor of more exciting programs and capabilities. It does, however, exactly what you want!

I recently attended a meetup group and wanted to capture the discussion at one point, and here's how I used Voice Memos on my iPhone 4 to record our conversation...

Step one, as always, is to find the app and tap on it. Here's the app icon:

Tap on it and you see a big microphone and a small indicator meter on the bottom. Fairly minimal design, actually:

To begin recording, tap on the red button on the lower left. Now point the bottom of your phone towards the conversation or into the middle of the room, as appropriate, because that's where the microphone is located on the iPhone.

Notice that the top indicates running time for the recording (in this case 00:05 seconds) and the bottom VU meter is now showing that it's "hearing" and recording things. That's good.

When you're done, tap on the black square button on the lower right. The button on the left pauses the recording (good for if people are changing computers, someone just stumbled into the room late, etc).

Instantly you'll be shown the recordings that are now on the phone, from newest to oldest:

This indicates that I have two test recordings, one that's 11 seconds long and the other that's 5 seconds long. Tap on one to preview it.

My real recording, however, was over an hour long and so when I tapped on the "Share" button, here's what I saw:

Quite convenient and easy to share if it's not too long...

Hopefully your recordings aren't too long, but if it is, then just sync your iPhone with iTunes on your computer and when you look at all the music, you'll find a new genre called "Voice Memos" and within it, well, check it out:

That's all there is to it. You now have a handy copy of the audio from the meeting, performance, discussion, whatever, conveniently copied onto your computer. I would recommend going back to the iPhone itself and deleting those long recordings once you verify that they're successfully copied onto your iTunes system too, just to save space.

Good luck, and good luck with all those meetings!