Today's daily app is billed by creator Johannes Borchardt, founder of Munich-based developer ANDLABS, as a "beautiful and simple voice recorder," and it is, once you get past a few interface quirks. The AL Voice Recorder is a free app for Android that's simple to use thanks to its great big buttons, and we believe that with a tweak here, it would be close to perfect.
The first thing that fooled us was the black and white microphone icon, shown here toward the upper right. We mistook this as the record button, when actually it triggers Android to accept a file-name input verbally. The function worked well enough, but it took us off guard; its icon is nearly identical to the app's orange-colored one.
And we might not have made this mistake if the actual record button looked more like a record button. It's the orange one with the white circle. We were looking for something red. While recording, a digital timer shows minutes and seconds elapsed. Ideally, its digits should probably be bigger, we thought.
These nits aside, the ad-supported AL Voice Recorder gets our vote for ease of recording management. It supports recording in 3gp (default) and WAV formats (on supported devices) and set the bit rate, lets you rename, delete and forward recordings via Gmail and SMS. It also plays mp3 and other formats and can set recordings as ringtones. An ad-free version costs $4.16.
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