If you've never used the Voice Memos app on your iPhone, you're missing out on one of the more useful hidden capabilities of the device: the ability to be a quite competent audio recorder. It's not like having a sound engineer on site, but if you're in a meeting and want to be able to capture the discussion and study it later, or you're on a Skype call and want to record it, or are at a live performance and want to enjoy it again later, that gadget in your pocket is definitely ready to do double duty.
Problem is, the mic on the iPhone works well if you're talking directly into it, but if you're laying it on a chair to record something that's 10' or further away, not much of the signal seems to get through!
Enter the Blue Microphone Mikey, an external mic that plugs directly into your iPhone and makes those recordings a whole lot better. This is their second external mic for an iOS device, but the first gen was only for early iPods and didn't work with iPhones or iPads. This new gen definitely does and even has a standard 30-pin connector.
I'm a long-time fan of Blue Microphone and routinely use my Snowflake for conference calls and my big Yeti Pro for more serious audio recordings like voice over work. The company just makes superb microphones for computers and when they shared with me details of the new mini-USB mic that was designed to just plug into the side of a laptop and give you better audio for any application, I was definitely interested.
It's finally shipping and the Tiki looks unlike any USB microphone you've seen and, name withstanding, appears more like a snail than anything else:
What's most important, however, is that it sounds really good, and doubly so for the size.
I bought a new Yeti Pro microphone and while it looks very cool and probably sounds great on recordings, I can't get it to work on my Microsoft Windows 7 system. When I check the system status it shows "This device cannot start (code 10)" and when I plug it in, it fails. On some discussion boards they say that I should just keep unplugging/plugging and it'll eventually work, but that's driving me crazy. How the heck do I get this to work??!
Between podcasts, video narration, voice overs, conference calls with Skype and hands-free discussions with Google Talk, I spend a lot of time tapping into the audio capabilities of my Apple MacBook Pro. Problem is, while the built-in microphone on the top edge of my laptop is functional and unquestionably convenient, it's not the best sounding device in the world, a particular problem when I'm recording something for posterity.
I have a variety of different microphones -- and am proud to list Blue Microphone as a sponsor of my podcasts -- so when they introduced the new Yeti Pro that offered the best of the digital computer microphone capabilities of the original Yeti with the connectivity and flexibility of an XLR microphone, I was psyched to get my hands on one.
What podcasts, you ask? Thanks for being curious! My friend Michael Sitarzewski and I have a weekly podcast called Boulder Open Podcast [iTunes link], and the two of us add Doyle Albee to the mix for our Three Insight podcasts [iTunes link], also recorded weekly.
As I have moved more into conference calls via Skype and am now involved in two podcasts on a weekly basis (Boulder Open Podcast (or in iTunes) and Three Insight (or in iTunes), you are listening to them, right? I hope so!) I'm finding that the built-in microphone on my MacBook Pro isn't the optimal audio quality. Worse, there's also a frequent feedback loop of it picking up the audio coming out of the speakers which leads to a sort of weird echo/reverb loop.
As a result, I've been on the hunt for a good, small, portable microphone that will offer better audio quality and still be compact enough that I can have it in my computer bag without adding weight and bulk. My ideal is a tiny lavalier microphone that can be clipped onto my shirt and plug into the "mic" input on my MacBook Pro, but so far I haven't found a single manufacturer offering such a thing. Oddly, but maybe it's a tough problem.
When my colleagues and I have all been in the same room, we've been recording our podcasts using the Blue Microphone Snowball, which is a nice microphone but pretty big and bulky. When Blue Microphone contacted me and asked me if I wanted to evaluate the Snowflake, what they call their "portable professional USB mic", I was most interested...
If you've never used the Voice Memos app on your iPhone, you're missing out on one of the more useful hidden capabilities of the device: the ability to be a quite competent audio recorder. It's not like having a sound engineer on site, but if you're in a meeting and want to be able to capture the discussion and study it later, or you're on a Skype call and want to record it, or are at a live performance and want to enjoy it again later, that gadget in your pocket is definitely ready to do double duty.
