AudioBoo
AudioBoo has me excited. It fills a gap, it’s a missing link, and while we wait for a good quality audio/video (maybe VideoBoo) on an non-jailbroken iPhone.. This is going to keep me more than occupied.
Audioboo is an audio blogging platform in the shape of an iPhone app that was in private beta in January but is now available free of charge right now in the app store.
I first got wind of it through @Sizemore via @Bash. Weirdly I had just been listening to @Loudmouthman and @doctorpod on the podcast Social Media White Noise as they talked about something i had said in an old podcast of mine about wanting a one touch podcasting solution. I have never really got into Utterli. Sometimes it takes the simple interface of an iPhone app to really grab my imagination.
In a nut.. it lets you create and tag recordings and upload them to a timeline with your GPS coordinates and a photo. The app and site are very much a work in progress and I’m very excited to see how it will develop.
I have already submitted my Atom feed (http://audioboo.fm/users/124/boos.atom) to the iTunes store and recorded a couple of interviews at @StationX The RSS could do with some work and there are some UI ideas i would like to pass onto @mattwaring and the team but with plugins and access to an API on the horizon I really feel a serious journalistic tool, as well as a fun social media toy has arrived on our iPhones.
I imagine it’s only a matter of time before Audioboo is available for other phones, either as apps or within their mobile browsers.
In the meantime, while i experiment, I have fallen back in love with audio. It makes you think more about how you describe your surroundings. It makes me want my surroundings to explain themselves. Either by getting close to a person and their opinion or close to environmental sounds. Combined with a photo attached to act as a catalyst for the imagination, the listener is not being force fed the story. they have to take a moment to let their imagination get involved in the media.
There is no hiding behind the production here though.. these sound bites, (at the moment anyway) are limited to 5 minutes of raw recording. If you make a mistake, your humanity shines through. The intro and outro do not get in the way of the content, as they are the content.
At the moment I’m playing with adding a windshield to the iPhone for cleaner outdoor interviews but to be honest, I’m amazed at the audio quality as it is.
Perhaps the words would flip round with the assistance of the iPhones accelerometer when the phone is held upside down. The button to start and stop the recording is already in a great place for this.
Here is a link to my feed.. http://www.audioboo.fm/profile/Documentally
If you have one of your own please drop me a link in the comments below. Lets experiment with this cool new tool so we grow with it and shape it into an even better app than it is today.
March 18th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Hi Christian. I was luckily enough to be working at home yesterday, so it was easier to goof off and check what was going down on Twitter, so I spotted your links to your AudioBoo interviews @stationX.
Top job. The AudioBoo interviews were really professional and informative. Great subject matter and wonderful interviewees.
I’m really glad that AudioBoo has brought you back to audio because I still think that your Podcasts are great pieces of work and still stand up to repeated listening.
Funny enough I think to me, with the right subject, audio can be a more intimate and emotionally focused medium. So I’m really glad this great iApp, AudioBoo is here for novices like me.
I tried it with my iPod Touch and a dodgy mic and was really surprised with the outcome.
AudioBoo is a keeper. I can’t wait to get a bit of free time to start playing with this properly. Great.
Anyway, keep up the good work and I urge any readers of this comment to check out your old Podcasts.
Best regards,
Derek
March 18th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
I’m an utterli user (http://utterli.com/whall) and really like the ability to record my audio from whatever computer I’m at, or from whatever phone by dialing their number. Their email/text interface also allows me to sms a title, tags, text, photo and video to mash up all the content into one entry as long as I send it within 10 minutes of each other.
I would guess that an iPhone, blackberry, windows mobile, etc app for utterli would be the next logical step since they already have the social networking infrastructure to promote, categorize, cross-post, search and manage multimedia content.
The audioboo seems like it might be good for offline recording and upload/sync at a later time. But then again, the correctly coded utterli app should be able to do the same thing. And I would think GPS-encoding would also be a function that the app could do.
thanx for the review!
March 18th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Yeah, I also feel excited about the possibilities audioboo gives us. I record a weekly podcast for a local school – http://www.michaelfaradayschool.co.uk. The ideas that the kids generate make it great fun, but for me personally, some of the spontaneity is taken out of the process when I have to export, the file, ftp to my server, create a new page in DreamWeaver and then publish it all.
Audioboo can strip this process down to the bare basics, and make the podcast come alive for what is should be – a raw, direct conversation with friends and family of the school.
SE1 posted up a good boo (the correct term?) last night – true, local journalistic use of the tool:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/564-southwark-licensing-committee-considers-saturation-policy
All I need now is… an iPhone. I’m working off an INQ1 (iPhone lite.) A similar cross platform app would be great.
Interesting times…
March 18th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Derek,
Thanks for your kind comments..
Hi Whall,
Utterli sounds pretty featured filled. I guess the reason why i like AudioBoo so much is that the audio is not compressed for streaming but more so for uploading after recording. I have not heard the same quality in any audio or video app and being so new i get the feeling i can grow with the apps it develops.
Cheers, Christian
Hi, OnionBagBlogger,
Thanks for your comment. I agree Interesting times. Good luck with the podcasts and thanks for the link.
Cheers. c.
March 18th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
Incidentally.. I am not being paid by, or have been given any gifts from AudioBoo before during or after the writing of this blog post.
I am just genuinely excited about how well it works when not even half finished.
I would love to talk with with them to see if we can do some projects together. I have a couple of cool ideas i think may work..
March 19th, 2009 at 4:39 am
I’ve never wanted an iphone more than now after reading this…
March 20th, 2009 at 12:24 am
[...] I never. In only three days AudioBoo has metamorphosed before my eyes into a simple, intuitive podcasting [...]
March 20th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
- Parker
I agree 100%, I love this App and I have not even tried it yet!
Lee
March 24th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
[...] Our Man Inside Rock said Audioboo should be used to augment other reporting and that audio was an emotive medium – both ideas that seem to have been taken on board by ’social media mongrel’ Christian Payne in his use of the app. “[W]hile i experiment, I have fallen back in love with audio. It makes you think more about how you describe your surroundings. It makes me want my surroundings to explain themselves. Either by getting close to a person and their opinion or close to environmental sounds,” he writes in a blog post. [...]
April 10th, 2009 at 12:56 am
[...] I actually have a lot of video and photography from the day too, but the deal was that none of that gets out just yet. Which is fine with me – I only just today found an outlet for some of the stuff I’ve been sitting on from 12 months ago. The beauty of Audioboo on the day was it allowed me to get the feel of the production out alongside Twitter updates while not having to worry about releasing the visuals – although the makeup and special effects I saw were wonderfully detailed. You can read an overview of Audioboo over on @documentally’s blog. [...]
April 17th, 2009 at 5:07 am
Greatings, Can i take a one small photo from your blog?
Have a nice day
April 28th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
[...] from his Zoom recorder) The windscreen helps him look more ‘reporter like’, and the audioboo app let’s him record and upload podcast on the [...]
June 27th, 2009 at 5:11 am
Good idea! I have a problem of touching the mic on the bottom of the iphone and just the idea of turning it upside down is so helpful! Thanks for telling me about AudioBoo! I’m liking it already!
I love the send video through email feature of the iphone. Soooo awesome!
-Freida
May 3rd, 2011 at 8:15 pm
And just over 2 years later and 1000 boos.. it’s still going strong..
http://ourmaninside.com/2011/05/03/my-1000th-audioboo/