Review: Audio Notetaker lets you sit back and listen while it takes notes

Every student or conference attendee knows the ever-present dilemma: listen to the presentation, or try to take notes? Sonocent Audio Notetaker is an ambitious product that brings an end to this plight...at least some of the time.

Audio Notetaker analyzes audio recorded either by the program or outside it to create speech bars that are easy to navigate. You can enhance these bars with colors, text, images, screenshots, slides, and PDF documents, and add text and references to boot. Audio Notetaker can record live lectures, interviews, Skype calls, and even online talks a la TED. It makes it possible to concentrate on listening while taking minimal notes, and easily go over the recorded material later.

Audio Notetaker is a truly innovative way to handle recordings, but at its current price of $150 for a perpetual license, it's not an impulse buy. It also crashed multiple times while I tried it, causing me to lose my work, so frequent saves are advised. It's a great product if you can soak the cost.

Note: The Download button takes you to to the vendor's website, where you can download the software.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Review: Livescribe Sky WiFi Smartpen links your ink and audio to Evernote

The Livescribe Sky pen marries old-school pen-and-ink with the cloud. If paper remains a core part of your workflow, this is the best pen of its kind on the market. You can save notes and audio recordings to your Evernote account via Wi-Fi, or you can plug in a Micro-USB cable and save your work to a PC or Mac.

The pen is fairly bulky, but it's pretty comfortable to hold. It would stick out from inside a pocket but it slips easily into a travel bag. The pen cap is easy to lose and hard to put on, so I usually left it off (and the tip didn't suffer from the exposure). Livescribe makes smart use of its tiny LCD screen, displaying Wi-Fi and battery indicators as well as the time and date. Dive deeper and you can play with the display: Use your handwriting and the interactive "buttons" in its supported paper notebooks to play simple games, run equations on a calculator, and translate words. There's even an ecosystem of apps, including dictionaries.

Other smart pens, such as the Adapx Capturx, let you write on any type of paper, but I've found those better for paper-form input versus freehand writing. Livescribe requires special (and pricey) paper, with tiny dots on the page that track your writing with precision.

The Livescribe Sky pen is designed to be paired with Evernote, so it won't be of much interest if you don't use that app. It's a plus, though, if you enjoy Evernote's productivity features (and you get an Evernote Premium account for a year). Use tidy penmanship with your Livescribe pen, and Evernote's optical character recognition can translate that into digital text.

Do you need the Livescribe Sky pen? For most people, that's an easy no. For example, you can always take a picture of handwritten notes from your smartphone and send it to Evernote, so why pay between $120 to $250 for a smart pen? One reason is that Livescribe does cool stuff other devices can't, including syncing audio recordings and written notes. This makes it a great tool for journalists covering events. Students and teachers could benefit, too. An instructor could share "pencasts" that explain trigonometry ratios, for instance, while students take interactive notes to spell out the formulas and shapes during class.

The Sky pen is also more portable than even a tablet with a supported pen. While serious artists will need Wacom-level sensitivity, Livescribe's pen is good enough for casual sketches. Its battery lasted for weeks as long as I remembered to turn it off regularly.

The Livescribe Sky pens cost $170 for 2GB (200 hours recording), $200 for 4GB (400 hours) and $250 for 800GB (800 hours). The Sky pen's wired predecessor, the 2GB Echo smart pen ($120), is also still available. Hook it up to a Mac or a PC, and you can upload notes to Google Drive, Facebook, Evernote and OneNote.

Elsa likes tools that help small businesses save money, work smarter and reduce waste.
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Review: MuLab is a little-known gem of a digital audio workstation

At first glance, Mu.Lab from MuTools might appear to be one of those simple, feature-deprived efforts you see from a multitudes of software vendors trying to cash in on Garage Band's success. However, just a few minutes with the free edition of this audio recording and MIDI sequencing program, and you'll realize there's much, much more to it than first meets the eye. Indeed, it's now my favorite track-based recording app--and I've used nearly every product on the market. It's available for both PC and Mac.

Where Mu.Lab shines is in hiding its power while still keeping it in easy reach. The secret is right-clicking--much of the program functionality is found in context menus. Everything looks nice and the use of icons is for the most part spot on--minimal and limited to those that are easily intuited. Too many vendors try to squeeze every feature onto the main screen, use too many similar-looking icons and wind up with a severe case of information overload. The interface isn't perfect, but it's a lot closer to it than the majority of competition.

The session mux lets you see and edit the super flexible audio signal routing.

Mu.Lab supports drag and drop so you can import MIDI and audio files directly from the desktop (there's also an integrated browser). I recreated/imported an entire 12-track MIDI/audio Studio One project in about ten minutes. The program also fully supports VST effects and instruments and includes its own reverb, EQ, sample player, drum set, synth, etc. You must scan for VSTs manually, but I find this approach appealing it doesn't waste time automatically scanning each time the program boots as other DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) do.

Besides power and simplicity, perhaps Mu.Labs greatest asset is its incredibly flexible routing, which reminds one of a modular synthesizer. You can send signals along any path to any effect, Mu.Lab rack (versatile routing and mixing strips), input, output, etc. You can also view and edit the entire routing scheme in the session mux routing schematic. Once you're used to the power of free-form routing, it's difficul to go back to the stricter mixing board concept.

MuLab is not without foibles. It makes you confirm deleting any object and unlike most programs, you won't see a representation of what you're recording in real time. You get  a visual waveform only after you've finished recording. For those used to programs that provide more feedback on the process, this requires an initial leap of faith, but you'll get used to it quickly and it's less distracting. Some of the visual elements draw your eye to the wrong area, but by and large, the interface is top-notch.

Looks can be deceiving in MuLab. Right-click any object and you'll usually find the functionality you need.

MuLab lacks one feature that some users will miss—audio punch in/punch out. Called punch because the process originally involved a recording engineer punching a button, it allows recording to start when you reach a marker, and cease when it reaches a second marker. You can of course record on another track (MuLab does this automatically where there are overlaps), then cut and paste, and to be honest, I'm so used to this now that I don't miss punch all that much. I'd also like to see Music XML support, but I could say the same thing for nearly the entire industry.

A major Mu.Lab perquisite is portability; you can install it on a flash drive and take it with you for use on any computer. Many competitors hand out seat licenses that must be activated online, which can be a major pain for the musician about town. Mu.Lab is also very light weight for a DAW, weighing in at less than 19MB--including a fair number of instrument samples. And it's self-contained, i.e. it doesn't install any third-party or Microsoft Visual C++ DLLs as some programs to.

Any musician who records audio and MIDI, even if entrenched with their current DAW, should download Mu.Lab and explore it for an hour or two. It's not what you're used to, so give it some time. It's powerful, clean, simple, and the right-click functionality is highly efficient, not to mention addictive. So addictive that you might have a hard time not plopping down 25 Euros for the 8-track/16-bit XT version (not the 70s tape format!) or 75 Euros for the 32-bit version without limits on tracks, effects, or instruments. Consider that fair warning.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software. The free 4-track version is perfect for small recording projects like the local school play, church choir, etc. but you'll hear intermittent noise if you exceed its (or the XT version's) track, instrument, or effects limits.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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Review: Free Video Call Recorder for Skype records unlimited video and audio for free

Skype has become so popular since its launch in 2003, it's accumulated over 700 million registered users. One of the biggest advantages on Skype, aside from the free calling, easy video conversations and services like SkypeOut and SkypeIn, is how easy it is to record conversations. But most Skype recorders aren't free, or they're limited in some way. Free Video Call Recorder for Skype might have an uninspired name, but it claims to be completely free and unlimited in any way.

To start recording, choose your recording mode and click the record button.

According to the vendor's website, Free Video Call Recorder v1.0.2.115 (or FVCR) is "the first free Skype video call recorder in the world for recording Skype calls without any limitations." That's quite a claim for DVDVideoSoft to make, but it does seem that most recorders either cost money, record only audio, or are limited in some other way. But is it really without any limitations?

FVCR is a simple, lightweight program that comes with three different settings: Record all sides (picture-in-picture), Record other side only, and Record audio only. Upon my very first try with the first setting, I already encountered a slight limitation: You cannot record video at all if the other side didn't turn video on. This means there's no way to record your own video with the audio conversation, but I guess that makes some sense—chances are you don't want a recording of your own video. You can, however, click the record button when video is off, and it will automatically start recording when it's turned on.

While recording, you can either pause or stop the recording at any time.

Using FVCR is extremely simple. Skype will automatically launch as soon as you start the recorder, and after choosing your setting, you can start your conversation and hit the record button. You cannot start recording before a conversation is live. If you want to stop recording for a while but keep the conversation on the same file, use the pause button. The stop button will save the file, and hitting record again will start a new one. Pausing a session is seamless, creating a barely perceptible jump in the file.

The audio recording quality very much depends on the equipment you use. I got some pretty dismal audio recordings when using my laptop's built-in microphone (although I received no complaints about poor audio during the call), but excellent ones when using my headset. The program creates mp4 files for video calls and mp3 files for audio calls, which it automatically saves in the directory of your choosing. Note that if you change the default directory, you might find that it has reset itself when you restart the program.

Video recording is also surprisingly good. The mp4 file includes the other side's video on most of the screen, with your own video in a smaller frame on the bottom right corner—much like it appears on Skype itself. The program comes with a hang-up feature, so when a conversation ends, it automatically stops recording. This could be great if you tend to be forgetful, but it's a bit annoying if you did not actually mean to disconnect. In addition, if the other side turns off video in the middle of a recording, the file shows a frozen frame for the entire time the video was off.

The program creates dated and timed video and audio recordings.

All in all, Free Video Call Recorder is an impressive utility that makes it very easy to record both video and audio Skype conversations. It truly has no serious limitations to speak of, and there are only two features I would like to see added: a way to choose between several recording qualities, and some kind of notification reminding me whether I'm recording or not. Not everyone would remember to turn recording back on after a simple disconnection occurs—and these happen quite often on Skype.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system. When installing the program, it will attempt to install the free DivX Plus software. This is enabled by default, and you need to uncheck the appropriate box if you don't want it. It will also install the DVDVideoSoft Free Studio Manager, which is a glorified catalog of the company's products. You cannot opt out of the Free Studio Manager.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Magix Audio Cleaning Lab MX Removes Clicks and Pops

Magix Audio Cleaning Lab MX ($60, seven-day free trial) is the friendliest audio restoration, editing, and rendering program I've ever used--at least for the basics. It's especially easy for those who want to record and import audio from CDs, vinyl, and cassettes. In fact, much of the interface is dedicated to making that task easy. But what counts in audio restoration is how the audio sounds after the noise removal process. In that regard, Audio Cleaning Lab MX does a good job--roughly equivalent to the free Audacity.

Audio Cleaning Lab MX has the friendliest basic interface of any audio restoration program I've tested.Audio Cleaning Lab MX has a sophisticated interface and features given the price. It displays audio as mono, stereo, surround, as well as spectral analysis. You can cut, delete, trim, draw volume curves and perform other relatively advanced tasks.

Audio restoration tools include a de-clicker, de-crackler, de-clipper, de-rumbler, de-hisser, and direct spectral editing, i.e., grabbing certain frequencies at a specific time and deleting them. The latter is very difficult to do well without a scrubbing (auditioning) tool, which is not provided.

Audio Cleaning Lab MX also has a number of what it calls mastering tools, including a stereo expander/narrower, harmonic enhancement, reverb, and chorus. All work well--however, the feature I find particularly brilliant is the Inverse function found in the de-clicker and de-crackler. As all filters and FX are applied in real time, selecting Inverse allows you to hear only the sound that's being removed. It's a great way to hear if you're losing material you want in addition to defects.

For all my audio restoration testing I use an analog recording of "Manoir De Mes Reves / Daphne" from Afternoon in Paris, a 1971 vinyl recording by violinist Stephane Grappelli. Jazz violin is an especially good test for the task, as the bow noise and attack from the instrument is very much in the same range as clicks and crackles--of which there are plenty of in this recording.

The job Audio Cleaning Lab MX did restoring audio was roughly equivalent to the results I get with Bias SoundSoap 2 and Audacity. Like those programs, you can get better results if you make multiple passes. That is, remove noise, save, then remove noise again. That said, in no way can it match Izotope RX 2 in results, but then again it's only about one-sixth the price.

If you want something that's super easy, and does a very good job of transferring audio from cassettes, vinyl, and CDS then Audio Cleaning Lab MX is a good bet. And, it's a full functional trial for seven days.

--Jon L. Jacobi

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Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 with SRS Audio Runs Modern Combat 3 on Tablets

Qualcomm, like Nvidia with the Tegra 3, was demoing the power of its quad-core chip, the Snapdragon S4, at Mobile World Congress this week. And while the CPU manufacturer was quick to point out that four cores are not necessarily better than two, it did show how all those cores can enhance mobile gameplay in graphically intense titles, such as Modern Combat 3, as seen in the demo below.

The S4 was running the multiplayer on some reference design tablets, and Qualcomm had the action displayed on a big screen to showcase its chip’s graphics power. But it wasn’t just crisp visuals and fast frame rates; SRS audio technology built directly onto the S4 chip provides a sound boost that you can hopefully hear above the din of booth visitors in the background.

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