Recording - August 2013 - 57

pin connector (like the iXY) might not be
compatible with Lightning. As it turns out,
my fears have been unfounded; I have not
yet run into a single audio device for 30pin that doesn’t work with a Lightning
adapter, and the iXY is no exception.
As you can see from the photos, the onepiece Lightning adapter allowed me to use
the iXY with my iPhone 5 with no trouble at
all, and the 8” cable-based adapter let me
hook up the iXY to my iPad mini (and my
iPhone 5 while it was in its shock-protective
case). I also experimented with a CableJive
dockXtender cable, allowing me to set the
iXY up to six feet away from my iOS devices.
Physically disconnecting the iOS device’s
case from the body of the iXY with a cable
has both bad and good effects. On the one
hand, touching or tapping the cable produces low-end thumping that is clearly audible in recordings, but on the other hand,
there is essentially no handling noise when
operating the iOS device. This lets you fix
your mic in place, then adjust recording
gain or perform other functions on your
recorder without disturbing your audio.
RØDE Rec
RØDE Rec is a fearsomely capable
app. Not only does it allow you to record
mono or stereo input up to 24-bit/96 kHz
(24-bit/48 kHz mono without the iXY), but
it has powerful input-processing DSP routines provided by iZotope, a flexible set of
built-in editing tools, and powerful filesharing utilities to get your recording off
your iOS device when you’re done with it.
Getting started is easy. From the
Recordings list, hit the mic icon to configure your setup, selecting sample rate and
mono/stereo format; this is where you
confirm the app sees the iXY, which might
occasionally require unplugging/replugging to be recognized. Then hit the +
icon to create a new recording, set your
input gain with the popup adjustment slider, and hit Record. If you want to get
fancier, there are options for delayed
start, timed recording, setting Markers
automatically as you record, and more.
The aforementioned effects by iZotope
are accessed on the Input menu—you can
turn them on and off globally and select a
preset like “Live Concert Outdoors” or
“Interview” or “Rumble Reducer”. The main
thrust of these effects seems to be removing
artifacts and (in the case of the dialogue
presets) improving intelligibility under lessthan-optimal conditions. A separate Effects
menu lets you bypass and set characteristics
for a compressor and expander, and set up
a simple 3-band eq with highpass and lowpass filters plus a bell mid band, all with
adjustable frequency. (This highpass filter is
separate from the iXY’s built-in filter, which is
activated from the app’s Input menu.)
A waveform display is created on the fly
as you record, and the built-in meters display levels and clipping. You can set meter

characteristics and scale (default, VU, KSystem, Peak vs. RMS, PPM, etc.) per
recording. With Playthrough selected, you
can monitor what’s being recorded on
headphones, and a tap of the speaker icon
quickly lets you adjust your monitor level
whether recording or playing back. You can
play back your audio at normal speed or
sped/pitched up or down by up to one
octave (2x, 1.5x, 1x, 0.75x, 0.5x).
Editing
Most screens, including the recording
transport and all the information screens for
entering data about your recording, are
accessed from a bottom-edge menu while
in portrait mode. The Editor is opened by
tilting the iOS device into landscape mode;
you then get a large waveform display and
can access various tools by tapping the
screen. See the screenshots for details.

You can specify Regions of audio with
reasonable precision (entering precise times
via a separate menu if need be); these are
shown with red border flags in the display.
Regions can be named and tagged with a
photo and location, making them useful for
field recording situations so you can quickly
identify sections of large audio files.
The blue-flagged borders are for
SmartEdits, sections of audio where you
wish to carry out operations like cut, copy,
paste, split, etc., and the green Markers
can be labeled to help you find your way
around. Also shown in the screenshots: a
Fade (marked in yellow), where you can set
a variety of curves (or linear segments for
tight edits) and do full fades, gain boosts up
to 24 dB, or “reshapes” of ±12 dB.
SmartEdits can be moved backward and
forward in time, and their ends can be
stretched to expose silence or shrunk to cut
off audio you don’t want. They can be overlapped, mixing the audio in both sections
on playback, but I never figured out how to

crossfade, since Fades remain in place on
the timeline and don’t move with SmartEdits
when you slide them around. If you mess
up, a complete Undo history is included.
To the outside world
Your raw recordings are WAV files at
whatever sample rate you’ve chosen before
pressing the Record button, with edit settings saved along with the audio. When
you’re ready to release your work, you can
choose to export your files to Dropbox,
upload them to SoundCloud (setting permissions and licensing and sending out
notifications to your Contacts as you do),
use iTunes File Sharing to export them to the
cloud or access them from a web browser
on another computer, email them, or
upload them to an FTP server. Phew!
Before you do any of these things, you
have to “create an audio file”, rendering your
edited audio into a standalone file playable
by other programs. Your choices are (uncompressed) AIFF, WAV, or Apple Core Audio
Format; or (compressed) AAC, Podcast,
Apple Lossless, FLAC, or Ogg Vorbis. You
don’t get control over the compression settings within the app—they’re set within RØDE
Rec’s iOS Settings—but you do have control
over what metadata gets attached to the file,
and it can be different for each file type.
Lots to learn, huh? Fortunately the built-in
manual is very handy in answering most
questions, although a few graphic links are
broken and there is occasionally “what”
with no “why”. For example, the user is
expected to understand that a Broadcast
WAV is simply a WAV file with metadata
attached, which is why there’s no separate
Broadcast WAV export option. (And all
that stuff I said about why Regions are useful? Wild guessing on my part.)
A great pairing
The iXY mic and RØDE Rec app really
should be thought of as a pair; useful as
they are without one another, you need
both to get the most out of each. When you
combine them, you have a great-sounding
stereo mic feeding a highly capable recording app with tons of features for recording
musicians, news gatherers, sound designers, podcasters, and more. There are other
portable mics and field recording apps out
there, but this combination raises the bar
considerably and deserves a hard look if
you’re serious about this stuff.
Prices: iXY, $199; RØDE Rec, $5.99 (LE
version free)
More from: RØDE Microphones,
www.rodemic.com, www.ixymic.com
Thanks to Todd Majoris and the staff at the
Apple Store 29th Street, Boulder, CO, for
technical assistance of a 30-pin-to-Lightning
nature, and to Zack Lombard of CableJive
(cablejive.com) for the dockXtender cable.
RECORDING August 2013

http://www.rodemic.com http://www.ixymic.com http://www.cablejive.com

Recording - August 2013

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