Ideadump: a reel recorder for iOS

This is an entry from my ideadump – a place for ideas about audio development, MIDI, OSC and everything in between. Rough, unfinished and not a promise.

The idea

A mobile reel recorder. An iOS app that records and plays samples, but instead of looking like a file manager with a list of recordings, it looks and feels like a tape machine with two spinning reels.

Every recording app on my phone works the same way: press record, get a file with a timestamp as its name, find it again three weeks later in a long list. That’s fine for voice memos. It’s not fine for quick musical ideas, field recordings or samples I want to play with.

A tape recorder is different. You don’t browse it, you wind it. You know roughly where something is on the tape, you spin the reels, you listen, you stop. It’s tactile, and it’s fast.

Navigation: one big wheel

The most important part is navigation. No tiny timeline, no zoom gestures, no scrollbars. Instead:

• One big wheel (or the reels themselves) that takes up most of the screen
• Turn it clockwise to move forward, counter-clockwise to go back
• The faster you turn, the faster the tape moves – like scrubbing on a real machine, including the pitch going up and down
• Hold the wheel to stop the tape, let go to continue playing

Maybe the wheel is the reel. Maybe it’s a separate jog wheel like on a DJ controller or a video editing deck. Something to try out – the main point is that one thumb should be enough to find any spot in a recording.

Recording and playing samples

• Big, obvious transport buttons: record, play, stop, rewind, fast-forward
• Record instantly, no dialogs, no naming before recording
• Every take lands on the “tape” one after another
• Playback should feel like tape: reverse playback, varispeed, maybe a bit of wow and flutter
• Group recordings on separate tapes or cassettes instead of folders

Things to figure out

• How to show where you are on the tape without falling back to a classic timeline. A waveform under the reels? A tape counter?
• How the wheel feels: inertia, haptic feedback, snapping to the start of a take
• Should a “tape” be one long recording or a collection of single samples?
• Low latency recording and scrubbing on iOS – AVAudioEngine or something lower level
• Export: the samples need to get out of the app easily, into a DAW or another app

Why

Because I want it. Because a tape machine on the shelf is more inspiring than a list of files called “Recording 47”. And because it’s a nice excuse to dig into realtime audio on iOS.

Note

This idea did not stay in the ideadump. It turned into SPULE – a reel-to-reel tape recorder for iOS where you scrub through takes by turning the reels.