Sonoma Wire Works, developers of audio app RiffWorks have teamed up with iPhone Recorder developers Retronyms to create a new audio recording & mixing application, named FourTrack.
Fostex X-18, 4-track tape recorder
FourTrack, as its name implies, acts as a basic four-track audio recording and mixing tool. Audio engineers and songwriters alike will of course be very familiar with the concept, as four-track tape recorders have been in heavy use as music recording devices on a budget. The app mimics typical four-track tape recorders both in function and form.
I’m pretty excited about this new App as I’ve done a lot of sampling and recording using Voice Notes (available free in App Store), which has worked out great so far. Of course, being able to record multiple tracks and mix them on the fly would be super useful as a scratchpad tool, and at a meager $10 it’s an affordable way to get some ideas recorded.
FourTrack screenshot
The only downside I’m seeing at the moment is that you’d need an adapter cable or two to get a line input into the iPhone, using the headphone jack which doubles as an input when using the iPhone headphones’ built-in microphone. For me, as a producer of electronic and industrial style music, recording with a microphone is going to kill the quality enough to make it useless for serious work, so a direct line input is somewhat of a necessity. This isn’t something I’ve looked at, but if you happen to know a solution, feel free to leave a comment and share your experiences on this topic.
Anyway, FourTrack will record your tracks at a typical 16bit 44khz quality. You can pan and fade these tracks to your liking, and skip around in the timeline painlessly. Once you’ve recorded tracks, you can sync them to your machine via wifi connection. There’s also a built in compressor/limiter, which is – in my opinion – a nearly must-have feature, considering that the iPhone mic will generally produce a very quiet audio track.
You can buy FourTrack in the App Store right now, for $9.99 .
Could you, for example, use a mono 2.5mm lead as a line?
I’m assuming that the jack inside the phone is the same as a stereo jack but with an extra pin, so the mono lead would make contact with all three of the pins, including the input one.
Might work. Might not. Just something I’ve been meaning to try but haven’t had a chance.
You need an iO dock
Which alesis makes
https://www.alesis.com/iodock