Streaming Freebies A well-rounded blog about all things tech.

The best Android app for Voice Recording.

Voice recording. Yet another crack in my otherwise beloved Android experience where Google fails to deliver an impressive stock experience. The stock voice recorder application suffers from limitations such as confinement to the pathetic quality of the rarely supported 3gp file format, no built-in sharing features, and interruption of the recording with any pop-up notifications such as GO SMS text popups, with no ability to resume recording.

To illustrate, here is a demonstration of how, ahem, feature-rich the Android "Sound Recorder" application is:

Stock Android Sound Recorder (Click for bigger image.)

And an audio clip from the stock recorder (converted with minimal loss to MP3 for sharing).

Fortunately, the openness of the Android Market one again fills the void of the stock Android features. RecForge Lite, a free (with pay version available) app for voice recording, increases the choices tenfold while still maintaining simplicity. It includes features for sharing with a multitude of services including, my favorite, Dropbox. It includes file format selection of MP3, OGG, and WAV, and also includes the ability to re-encode to another file format after recording. Other nifty features include a CPU usage meter and, best of all, it doesn't stop recording when focus changes due to a pop-up notification or even when the phone is locked either intentionally or unintentionally.

The features do not detract from a very straightforward interface:

RecForge Voice Recorder Features (Click for bigger image.)

A sample of the wonderful, yet still nicely compressed, audio quality:

All of these features are included with the free version with the only limitation being after 3 minutes of recording, it pauses, and can easily be resumed by hitting the record button again. The full version is (currently) only $3.99. Market link: RecForge Lite (Free version).