All I wanted to do was make short recordings. Sometimes, it’s the cat, so that P. can share in the joy that is his needy, scream-y, pathetic, attention-starved kitteh when kitteh decides it’s high time for deh-day to be home. Sometimes, it’s to force P. to actually listen to the reason I’m up all night, making him complain because my (7w) bedside lamp is on…his remarkable impression of Fred-bleeding-jesus-Flintstone (with bonus teeth-grinding, kicking, cover-stealing and whacking me in the fucking back with his literally stainless steel left elbow). I’ll also use it in spring, when the summer birds come back and I hear (but cannot see) a little fevvered someone whose pretty song I don’t recognise.

I used to have a little free thingie from the App Store…called i-something. It was fine, even if I did have to download some beta software and use Windows in order to take recordings off the phone, but last night, when I was trying to record the Snore Sonata before finally giving up, grabbing the mangy old pillow I’ve had since I was five (seriously…I brought it with me because I’ve never slept without it) and going out to crash on Cat Dander Street in Asthmaville (AKA chesterfield in our living room), the app crashed. It started, went to the record screen and crashed. I tried a couple of times, then gave up because I was too tired to care. I tried it again this morning…same thing. I rebooted the phone…same thing. I reinstalled the app…still crashed. The “free” version is ad-supported, so I’m going to guess it has something to do with the ad-blocking hosts file I just put on the phone. “Fine,” says I, “I’ll just get something else. It’s a goddamned recorder…there must be more than one.”

There are indeed a couple of recorders in the App Store. None in Cydia, and the only other one in the App Store that was free allows you to record and save, but if you want to transfer the recordings to a computer, you have to buy their software, which I believe costs $14. Not a lot, but that buys a fair number of iPhone apps, so I thought there had to be a better way. If the files were saved on the phone, then that meant all I had to do was get to them.

Thanks to my own iPhone Guru (he rules…*MWAH*), mine is an iFreedomPhone, and I have access not only to the bits of the phone’s file system that Apple thought I should have, but to the whole thing. I also have SSH, and an FTP client with a GUI to make it easier to find stuff when I’m just poking about blindly. It didn’t take me more than a few minutes to hunt down the test files I’d made, and then all I had to do was copy them to the computer. The file format was .caf, and Gnome didn’t have an icon to display, but I looked at the file properties and it at least appeared to know it was an audio file. First, I tried VLC because that will usually play anything you throw at it, but it couldn’t. Then, just for the hell of it, I decided to try Audacity. Ugly as sin, but it’s meant to be a sound editor, so logically, it would recognise any formats for which I had a codec (and if I don’t have ’em all, I’m close). A quick check revealed .caf to be Apple’s “Core Audio File,” but I thought, “Meh…I’ll try.” I opened it up and browsed to the .caf file, thinking Audacity would give me some error message that might be helpful, but nope…it opened the file right up, and it played just fine. Better yet, since Audacity is an actual editor, it allowed me to boost the volume and export it to the file format of my choice (I chose mp3 because it was there). My first test recording has a few rude words in it because I was bemoaning the $14 app to P., but the second one is G-rated.

So…yay. Yay for ever-patient iPhone gurus, nerdy hackers and Thin Lizzy if you’re my guru, and AC/DC if you’re me. No crashes, no “ad-supported” (or worse, having to unblock ad hosts), no buying $14 worth of software that I don’t really want and wouldn’t use more than a few times, to install on an OS I actively try to avoid using. It’s not spring yet, but the days are getting longer and longer, and pretty soon, those little birdies will come back…and I’ll be ready to ID them even when I can’t see them. I may not always have my Canon with me to record footage of a “singing tree”, but unless I’m in the shower, my iPhone is never far from my hand (I even try to charge it whilst I’m asleep so I don’t have to be tethered or away from it for long. God, I’m pathetic). 🙂

I created a bookmark in gFTP, but that was to the root, so if I forget before the next time I have a chance to make a bookmark right to the correct directory, the path is thus:

/private/var/mobile/Applications/DCBD861F-1C7E-48EB-9941-6E84437AE869/Documents