Apple’s recent iPhone event brought some great insights camera button a Reinventing Google Lens and beyond. The company also announced that it has brought Simple multitrack recording to voice memos. This was especially interesting to me because I use Voice Memos a lot. I have about 500 of these little posts over the life of my iPhone 14 Pro and thousands more in the cloud. In 2013, you never know when you’ll need that random tune you’ve been humming while waiting for the subway.
So this feature is specially designed for me. I write songs. I play the guitar. I do everything that lady in the ad doesincluding opening the refrigerator late at night for no reason.
Then reality hit. This is not a software update that will hit all iPhone models. is related to ultra-premium iPhone 16 Prostarting at a cool $1,000. I don’t want to upgrade right now, so the urge to sing over an acoustic guitar track in Voice Memos dies when it arrives.
Why is this particular feature behind the iPhone 16 Pro? This is a simple multitrack recording function. From the advertisement, it appears that the application cannot fold more than two tracks at the same time. That can’t exactly tax the A18 Pro chip, especially when the phone can handle 4K/120 FPS video recording in Dolby Vision.
Pro Tools, the popular digital audio workstation, was first introduced in 1991. This was two years before Intel released the Pentium chip. The computers of that time had no problem folding tracks. For some reference, last year’s A17 Pro chip had about 19 billion transistors. The original Pentium chip had about three million. In other words, a modern smartphone chip is about 6,300 times more powerful than a 1993 Pentium-based computer.
So let’s fold tracks in audio recordings, Apple! It can’t be that complicated. I’ve been using custom multitrack apps since the iPhone 3. Apple uses GarageBand with every iPhone. Both GarageBand and third-party recording apps have their place, of course, but nothing beats the speed and ease of use of Voice Memos. It would be great to make a quick and dirty acoustic demo of a song and send it to someone without having to navigate a fairly complex interface.
Yes. I see the elephant in the room. There is a part in the ad that I missed. A woman records vocals over a guitar track without wearing headphones. He was standing in front of the refrigerator and just singing into the phone. Now that’s something old-school Pentiums couldn’t do. There’s microphone placement wizardry, along with machine learning algorithms that reduce unwanted ambient noise. The iPhone 16 Pro has an all-new microphone array, so I understand that older models may not be able to handle this particular part of the equation.
But who cares? This is a really neat feature. It’s also completely unnecessary. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already wearing headphones/earphones or have some handy. Record the first track without headphones. Note the secondary layer when wearing headphones. that’s it. Problem solved. You can even do this in front of the refrigerator.
Also, both the entry-level iPhone 16 and Pro support Audio Mix, which allows people to adjust different audio levels from different sources after shooting a video. This is done without the new Studio Mics on the iPhone 16 Pro and reduces ambient noise in a similar way. So here may be a software solution to handle the elephant in the room. After all, the company provides loans “Powerful machine learning algorithms” for this technology – if it can remove ambient wind noise, surely it can handle the music playing in the background?
So I’m asking Apple once again to let the rest of us play with multitrack recording in Voice Memos. There’s no reason why every older iPhone model can’t calculate its own way for a simple guitar/vocal two-track wav file. Include the feature in a software update. i hear there is one for iOS 18 coming very soonand after that another for Apple Intelligence.
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