Noted for iOS and macOS - advanced voice recorder and text notes in one bottle

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

A universal application that will make life easier for students, journalists and anyone who often works with voice recordings.

What is Noted

The minimalistic note writer Noted combines everything that many professionals lacked. It allows you to record audio notes, while adding text comments to them. Such a program will come in handy at lectures, meetings, interviews, conferences and in other situations when you do not have time to record.

How it works

Adding audio

Notes in Noted are divided into notebooks like in Evernote and other similar applications. Moreover, you can attach both audio and plain text to notes created inside notebooks.

There is a big red button for audio. After that, it changes to a compact player menu, where a scroll bar, fast forward and backward transitions, and setting the playback speed are available. If necessary, the note can be supplemented by pressing the record button again.

Setting time stamps

The main feature of Noted is that when you add notes while listening to audio, timestamps are automatically attached to the text. In addition to the function of annotations, they also allow you to quickly navigate to certain parts of the recording.

If constant display is not enabled in the settings, then the labels are hidden to free up more space for the text, showing only when you swipe to the right.

Text formatting

The design of text notes is carried out through the formatting menu. Basic functions like headings of two levels, lists, quotes and separators are available here. Unfortunately, Noted does not support Markdown.

Key points of notes can be highlighted with color. To do this, just click the marker icon, select a color and mark the desired text. By choosing a colorless marker, the selection can be easily removed or corrected.

You can also attach an image from the camera or a ready-made picture from the gallery to your notes.

The smartphone has the ability to add handwritten notes or sketches. They work like sketches in standard Notes, with the difference that there are not many tools available in Noted.

Using tags

To organize your notes, Noted has tags that can be used as keywords and categories, as well as links to navigate to a specific part of the post.

Tags are added using a button on the toolbar or by entering a hash character from the keyboard. For quick search, use the corresponding menu on the main screen. On the desktop version, they appear in the side menu.

Protecting notes

In case the data inside the note is confidential, you can lock it with a password. The corresponding function is available in the menu by the left swipe or by clicking on the lock icon on the computer.

Protected notes are synchronized on all devices, and are opened by entering a password or via Face ID and Touch ID.

Audio quality settings

The recording parameters in Noted are selected in such a way that the sound is equally well heard in a large auditorium, in a quiet office, and in a noisy cafe. Three quality presets are available: Best (48 kHz), Good (44 kHz) and Space saver (16 kHz).

By default, audio notes are recorded in good quality, at which an hourly recording takes about 30 megabytes. The duration of the recordings is not limited and depends only on the amount of free space on the device.

Importing and Exporting Notes

Noted lets you import audio from other apps via iCloud Drive. Supported formats are MP3 and M4A. To import when creating a new note, click the microphone icon or simply drag the file into Noted from Split View.

Any notes are easy to share with classmates or colleagues. There are three options available: link, text and audio. Using the link, you can import a note into your Noted account, importing text and audio implies the creation of TXT and M4A files, respectively.

How to get Noted

The application is distributed on a subscription basis for 99 rubles per month or 999 rubles per year. There is a free version for review, which is limited to five notes, as well as free trial periods when subscribing for one week and one month, respectively.

Noted currently works on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. The developers are planning to launch a version for Android and other platforms.

What are the conclusions

Noted is not without flaws, but it can be safely recommended to anyone who often uses voice notes and is forced to constantly rush between a voice recorder and a notebook. The application will make your workflow more convenient and help you save time on processing records.

pros

• Versatility - you can take voice and text notes in one application.
• Convenient navigation - tags and timestamps make it easy to find the desired notes and fragments in them.
• Thoughtful interface - modern and minimalistic, each button is in its place.

Minuses

• No transcription - the function of translating audio notes into text would be appropriate, but so far it is not.
• Lack of Markdown support - only basic formatting is available, and export is done only in TXT.
• No text settings - the default is quite small text and only one typeface that cannot be changed.