Review: ALON MP3 Dictaphone
Score:
71%
Steve Litchfield tries this audio swiss army knife from ALON Software...
Version Reviewed: 1.15
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Now here's something I've been looking forward to reviewing. One of the biggest frustrations of S60's built-in Voice recorder application is that it's deliberately hard coded to a maximum of one minute, presumably to stop users starting it by accident and then filling their internal disk. MP3 Dictaphone's unique selling point is that it lets you break the barrier, and break it in some style, using the popular MP3 format rather than the more limited low-sampling rate WAV and AMR formats.
The core use of the application then is to allow longer and higher quality voice recordings, either as dictations for you or someone else to process later or, more intriguingly, as the basis for an audio podcast. Making use of idle time while walking or driving to record a podcast is a tremendously cool idea, even if not always incredibly practical (traffic noise, distractions, etc). As you can hear from this sample, at my chosen setting of 64kbps, 16KHz sampling rate, 16-bit audio (about half the overall 'quality' setting often used for MP3 music), it's not that bad, considering it's being recorded through a low grade smartphone mike.
The interface of MP3 Dictaphone is easy enough to use, with a central row of playback buttons and with left and right adjusting playback volume (or recording gain). An extra button on the right hand side is for a parametric equaliser, although I found the three EQ points fiddly and slow to adjust. Having an EQ setting is important for music playback, the second of MP3 Dictaphone's functions. In addition to the standard Symbian OS-supported formats (MP3/AAC etc), Ogg Vorbis is supported, which is welcome even now that we've got several other applications to play .ogg files. Music playback is on a folder by folder basis, which works well enough, although volume from the application is limited by the current firmware on most S60 3rd Edition devices (something to do with EU regulations?) and, as with OggPlay and the built-in Music player, you have to crank up the volume artificially in the equaliser in order to get any decent level - and then have to bear any distortion of loud passages of music. Sigh.... Not that this is MP3 Dictaphone's fault though....
The third string to this application's bow is the recording of phone calls, which works as advertised, with calls appearing in a separate browser in the main window, although you can't record these in MP3, but only in low-grade AMR or WAV, which is a shame.
I experienced some performance problems with MP3 Dictaphone, especially when playing back music. Unlike with Music player, Pocket Ogg or OggPlay, it didn't seem possible to do anything in the background on my smartphone while music was playing - and when I tried a little too hard to achieve this, MP3 Dictaphone crashed (twice) with some rather ugly errors.
My other criticism of the application is that the choice of recording formats and sampling rates is too simplistic, with a huge list to choose from. Each parameter needs its own dialog line, ideally. As it is, the restriction to just 8KHz and 16KHz sampling rates (amidst a list of many other combinations of overall bit rate and depth) means that, while quality is acceptable, the files aren't 100% compatible with some players, notably those that are Flash-based on web pages (which tend to prefer 11, 22 and 44KHz).
Despite these problems, MP3 Dictaphone is still the only tool that can do the job of recording long audio sequences and doing so flexibly and with good quality, and for that reason I'd still recommend giving the fully-working trial version a go.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at