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Comment by a1o | Hacker News Reader

One thing about the iPhone microphone. I had a beautiful day the other day here with some light drizzle and the sea waves were rocking nicely it was a great sound and the beach was empty. Great feeling. I wanted to record this but I only had my iPhone - was just walking in the beach. So neither the default recording app of the iphone and neither any of the ones I tried, could capture the ocean waves or the sound of the drizzle. I had previously (intentionally) set out to the beach with the intent to capture audio and did so with my Laptop + external mic. My conclusion is that unfortunately that is the way it has to be, and that it's not possible to capture audio on a whim as is with photos.

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The problem is that you're trying to record relatively quiet sounds that >99% of people would consider undesirable background noise, so many consumer devices will default to filtering out those sounds and do an excellent job. It would be quite easy for Apple to add a "nature sounds" mode to the recording app and work their computational magic in reverse, but I'm not sure that idea would occur to anyone in a design meeting or make it through review.

If you do want to record those kinds of sounds, the term of art is "field recording" and there's tons of good information available on how to do it well.

Yes, I understand. Currently the way I do is I use my laptop, a T14s, set it to power efficiency (so it barely turns the fans), turn on Audacity, and use an old headset that has a microphone, and a somehow very long cable - the actual rubber on the headset is long gone and I never replaced it. It serves me well but requires a backpack and it's a weird setup - but it works. I occasionally make games, and it's usually a bit hard to find nice chill nature and environment sounds that have a good quality, are calm and are royalty free (and cheap or free), so I end up capturing these sounds myself.

I believe such a setting exists in the control center for video calls, not sure about recording.

Which iPhone model?

The experience I described was with the 14 but I also tried in the 15 pro something similar and had same experience.

For now my approach is to use a external microphone with a longer cable and a notebook, and this works, but it would be nice to make this work with the iPhone.

I daily an (newest model) SE and got some wireless lavalier mics that plug into the lighting port. They work well and were cheap. Have to carry them around. Not name brand or anything. Though I hope to get some from rode.

What do you use for storage?

I don't use the phone productively, everything I tried I endup concluding it can't do? So it's only use is complaining about things in hacker news for killing time.

The most recent idea was trying to use it for sounds but I had the mentioned issue. Does the lavalier works for environment sounds or you only use for voice?

Mostly use it for recording technical talks at Python Atlanta meetups (I’m an organizer). Ambient sounds are not a priority. But I’ve used it to capture the sounds of a fresh water beach (which sounds much different than salt water). I did have to remove the cover on the phone to be able to do a proper a/b sound test. Maybe your cover isnt helping?

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