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Until recently, editing media like audio and video required significant computing muscle, but the iPhone has changed that. Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has included video editing in its latest version of its snazzy smartphone. Meanwhile, a scrappy company named Retronyms is bringing audio recording and mixing to the gadget.
While mixing music on an iPhone may not appear to be a serious pursuit for some, San Francisco-based Retronyms' FourTrack software, developed with Sonoma Wire Works, gained some notoriety last month when the rock group The 88 released a single "Love Is the Thing," recorded and initially mixed on the iPhone with the app.
With FourTrack, up to four audio tracks can be layered into a single recording.
For example, Retronyms cofounder Zach Saul explained to MacNewsWorld, "You could sing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat,' in round, by yourself." A vocalist could sing the entire melody on the first track. While listening to that track, the singer could add a second voice on the second track and so forth.
By the same token, a musician could record vocals on one track, drums on another, bass on a third and guitar on a fourth.
Bouncing Tracks
The app also has a bounce feature that allows four tracks to be combined into two. That opens up two more tracks for recording. That can be done indefinitely. "The disadvantage of bounce is that once you do it, you can no longer individually set the volume levels and pan sizes for the tracks," Saul noted.
A program like FourTrack can be very liberating for a music maker, maintained Doug Wright, president of Mountain View, Calif.-based Sonoma Wire Works.
"Normally, you're tied to a computer and a desk," he told MacNewsWorld. "Maybe you carry your laptop into a slightly nicer environment, but you still have to deal with, do I have enough power, do I have this, do I that?"
"The phone is on you all the time," he continued. "You can be on the tour bus. You can be on the subway. You can be wherever and come up with a tune."
In Praise of the App Store
Retronyms -- named after a term for creating new labels for old things because of technology advancement, such as the use of "acoustic guitar" when electric guitars were introduced -- was launched last year by a band of consultants lured into forming the company by the siren song of Apple's App Store.
"This App Store software marketplace thing is a boon for small developers that are trying to do products, because a big company does a lot of the distribution and even some of the marketing for you, which is really helpful," Saul said.
Since its inception, the App Store has received a brickbat or two because of its sometimes opaque review process. That hasn't shaken Retronyms' enthusiasm for the outlet.
"The application review process has been great for us," Saul asserted. "They've been able to find some pretty serious bugs that we had missed and report them to us with all the information we needed to fix them."
"From our standpoint," he continued, "its like an extra layer of quality assurance."
Recorder Into the Breach
Out of the gate, Retronyms had a hit on their hands with its Recorder app.
The original iPhone didn't have an audio recorder. That played to the strengths of Retronyms' founders, who all had experience in that realm. "It seemed an obvious hole that needed to be filled and something that we would be good at doing because of our previous experience," Saul observed.
The latest version of the iPhone operating system features its own audio recording tool, but Retronyms' cofounder believes Recorder will remain a popular app.
"The Apple voice recorder is very nice, but it doesn't have any high-end features," he maintained.
Recording Outgoing Calls
One of those features in Recorder is capturing outgoing calls from the iPhone. Because of the iPhone's design, calls can't be recorded by an app on the phone. Recorder skirts that limitation by rerouting outgoing calls to a Retronyms server, which connects the call and allows it to be recorded.
Although most of the company's apps are in the audio vein, it also has a clever game, "Seek 'n Spell," that uses the iPhone's GPS capabilities for a sort of live action, outdoor word contest.
Looking forward, Saul said that the company is looking into other mobile platforms. "Right now," he added, "the iPhone market is much bigger than the second biggest market, but we haven't ruled out making something like Android apps, for example."
