Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

The CarPlay App I’ve Been Waiting For

Auto Memo Recorder is now in the Apple App Store

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I don’t drive much, though these days I drive more than I had for a couple decades. This recent driving has, as I mentioned in a blog post here two years ago (“Message to Self: Lessons, conundrums and opportunities in voice-first EV interfaces”), helped me catch up on the role of audio interfaces in a mode of life that had become unfamiliar to me. As a result of the gap, I leapfrogged right into fairly mature CarPlay, which is Apple’s system that lets your phone become the car’s interface. The experience has been interesting, informative, and sometimes even useful. I’ve managed to come up to speed on various ways that sounds, including voice commands, have gained utility in digitally mediated vehicular activity.

I’ve touched on numerous aspects of this topic in blog posts and my This Week in Sound email newsletter. Throughout, the one thing that really seemed (note the past tense) to be missing, at least for me, was an easy, dependable way to record a voice memo. I won’t go into the details of the benefits of recording voice memos here; if you don’t find voice memos useful, more power to you, and if you do find voice memos useful, then you know what I’m talking about. I will add that with the recent rise of affordable excellent voice-to-text transcriptions (my primary app for this is MacWhisper, though I use the rev.com service on occasion), voice memos are more useful than ever.

As it turned out, CarPlay was (again, note the past tense) really lacking when it came to voice memos. Apple’s iOS operating system even comes with an app literally called Voice Memos (and in a recent update, this app came to include automatic transcription, though I find MacWhisper to be superior), and I use it every day at my desk and when I got for walks. However, unlike Messages and Maps and Podcasts and other such apps — even many non-Apple apps, like YouTube Music and Libby and Hoopla — Apple’s Voice Memos app has zero presence in CarPlay. I’ve mentioned this functional void routinely on social media, and I’ve summed up my frustration and confusion in the article linked to above.

And I’m not alone. A search for variations on “CarPlay voice memo” (and for its Google equivalent, Android Auto) yields numerous online discussions about makeshift fixes, such as leaving yourself a voice mail or texting yourself a voice recording. None of these options, I’ve found, has been particularly useful. The best I’ve been able to do is to use Apple’s Shortcuts feature to create a button on my phone’s home screen and lock screen to record right into the Voice Memos app — which works well, except it means I still have to use my phone, physically, which is not great when you’re driving a car.

And then, out of the blue, a person named David Kellas added a comment to my two-year-old blog post, saying he had gone ahead and made the app himself. “I wanted an app like this for ages,” he wrote in his post, “so built it for everyone to use without any subscription.” And it’s true: the app, which is named Auto Memo Recorder, costs just $1.99, a one-time fee. And it does what it says.

I installed Auto Memo Recorder on my iPhone (an iPhone 13 Pro) and I have been trying it out. It works well. It’s nothing fancy, just pure function. I generally am more of a touchscreen user than a voice-activation user, so my habit so far is to have the app on the home screen, which makes for a two-click or three-click process. I click on the app, and then I click to start recording. The third click is if CarPlay already has an app open (like Maps or Plex or YouTube Music), which actually is most of the time.

Right now, pretty much the only thing that, for my purposes, would improve upon what Auto Memo Recorder offers is for it to sync recordings via iCloud or Dropbox. I’ll keep using it, and I’ll report back on any other observations I have.

Auto Memo Recorder is available through the App Store. More details at invisiblestorm.co.uk/auto-memo. The website mentions “AI enhanced applications,” but the only apparent AI in Auto Memo Recorder is that it will transcribe the voice recording to text. The above image is a screenshot from the app’s website.

Scratch Pad: Wah, Autechre, Attenborough

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ A Chinese restaurant, not a guitar pedal shop

▰ Obsidian-headz: is there a detriment to deleting files from the Finder folder (I’m on a Mac), versus deleting them within the app itself (right click -> delete)? Thanks. I ask because I often have a dozen Bebop files and it’s easier to delete a group rather than one by one. (And I got replies, including one from someone who works on Obsidian, that indeed, this is OK. No detriments, no issues.)

▰ Imagine working on a product where everyone cheers when it goes down and talks about how much more they’re getting done

▰ Hyper local, but I just gotta take a moment to say that the vegan coconut at Polly Ann Ice Cream in the Outer Sunset (San Francisco) is insanely fluffy and tasty

▰ As I mentioned in the email containing the instructions for this week’s Disquiet Junto, the weekly process of these projects is like a biological clock for me, somewhere between the two processes — the “physiological” and the “behavioral” — that provide this week’s theme. And if I bungled the science with this one, that’s on me — please just roll with the metaphor.

▰ The cash register at this cafe had a malfunctioning receipt roll, and after an extended period of failed attempts by the cashier, who had many other simultaneous duties, to rectify the situation, several customers went on YouTube to locate solutions, and one of those worked. Just remarkable.

▰ Wasn’t expecting the first episode of the new season of Reacher to have a Thee Headcoats song playing during the end credits. (I’m wondering if a music supervisor just did a lyric search for a song talking about something context-specific, in this case a young girl.)

▰ I have no idea the extent to which this makes me an economic boycott scab, but I did manage to jump over various e-commerce hurdles to purchase a ticket to attend the Autechre / Mark Broom concert in a little over seven months. It’s at the Regency. Last show I saw there was the Atarashii Gakko! concert.

▰ I entered a tiny bathroom stall at the back of a bar, only to be greeted by a voice. The voice belonged to David Attenborough: a recording of him from Life on Earth. As I flushed, I Iearned that the “identity of species is proclaimed by the plumage.”

▰ Reading: I finished reading my third novel of the year, which given that we’re two months into 2025 feels a little slow, but of course this third book was Neal Stephenson’s epic and fantastic Cryptonomicon, and I read its 900-plus pages at a particularly slow pace because, this being my fourth time through it, I really wanted to pay particular attention. And I have to say, it is better than ever. When it was published, in 1999, the end of World War II was barely a half century past, and now we’re more than a quarter of a century since the book came out. Its technology is now old, if not as old as the technology of the Second World War. The book also closes better than I had recalled; Stephenson is known for often falling short in how his books conclude, but this Cryptonomicon should not be counted among the failures in that regard. And this bit comes from close to the end:

I’m nearly done, meanwhile, with Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and well into Cory Doctorow’s Walkway, and making continued slow progress with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. And I somehow didn’t finish reading a single graphic novel this week, even though I’m in the middle of a few.

RIP, Gene Hackman (1930 – 2025)

And the tragedy at the heart of The Conversation

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Gene Hackman arrives at the Pearly Gates. Saint Peter welcomes him in without even looking up. Hackman asks, “How did you know it was me?” Saint Peter replies, “You have a certain way of opening up the door. Y’know, first the key goes in real quiet, and then the door comes open real fast, just like you think you’re going to catch me at something.”

I’m not sure there is a movie that took my head, and in particular my ears, and put them squarely on the rails they were meant to be on quite like the The Conversation did, in large part thanks to sound designer Walter Murch, and of course the embodiment of the fraught act of listening that is Hackman’s surveillance expert, Harry Caul. I’ve been uncovering the deep truths of this 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film ever since.

My attempt at a joke in the first paragraph above cribs directly from what Teri Garr’s character, Amy, says to Hackman’s Caul.

There is a lot of tragedy in this film, and for me the essential tragedy is Caul’s inability — and keep in mind, this is someone whose job is to discern people’s hidden truths by observing them — to recognize Amy as his soulmate. He gets outwitted several times in The Conversation, but his worst error of judgment is his lack of real appreciation for Amy. The fact that she catches him spying on her should be reason enough for him to see in her something special — countersurveillance as foreplay. But here, in this scene, she makes it clear that her ear is as good as, if not better than, his.

Whenever I watch the movie, I can’t help but wonder if Amy would have noticed the misunderstanding at the heart of the audio recording that Caul, fatally, doesn’t. If only Caul had let her in.

Radio, Radio, Radio

Rick Prelinger, Anna Friz, Jeff Kolar

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I had a great time on Saturday night, the 22nd, at the Lab in San Francisco for a combination of lecture and music performance, a hybrid that may be my favorite format. The theme was radio. The lecture was by Rick Prelinger on the topic of “practical radio,” such as shortwave and CB, not to mention GPS and Bluetooth. The performance was by Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar, using real-time and prerecorded signals as the raw material for abstract atmospheric music.

A First?

Peter Gregson is always up to something interesting

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the cover image of a single, “Ritual,” from cellist Peter Gregson’s forthcoming self-titled album. I’m trying to think of another release from a major classical music record label that features a Eurorack synthesizer on its cover, as this one, from Decca, does. Peter Gregson is due out April 11. (And yes, the 1968 Switched-On Bach, by Wendy Carlos, featured a giant Moog on its cover, and it was released by Columbia Masterworks, but that’s over half a century ago, and a totally different synthesizer format.)

And if you’re not familiar with Gregson, I highly recommend his Bach album in the Recomposed series from the Deutsche Grammophon label — the same series as Max Richter’s excellent Four Seasons.