When I first heard a new audio recorder had hit the App Store, I immediately rolled my elitist eyes and thought to myself, who cares? After looking into it though, Piezo is accomplishing some pretty amazing things all while conforming to the strict guidelines required to offer your wares in the App Store.
Piezo, which touts itself as a “charmingly simple audio recorder,” offers up a hyper streamlined way to record audio directly at the system level. What this means is you can actually select which app you’d like to record the audio stream from rather than the entire system sound scope. Of course, your standard audio capturing features are there too, such as capturing from a device or microphone, but what app doesn’t do that?
I really am impressed that Rogue Amoeba was able to accomplish this, and get it distributed via the App Store, a feat which they admit has taken over a year. This isn’t Rouge Amoeba’s first time creating a system level audio app, in fact. Their tool Audio Hijack Pro has been cited as one of the best audio tools on the market. Due to the deep integration into OS X though, they were forced to go back to the drawing board.
Everything about the interface is simple. You have your channels visualized, and very few buttons to intimidate you. Simply select your source, hit record, and boom, you are off recording your audio. You can dig into the settings a bit, but none of it is overly complicated. Features for filenames and formats are available but not necessary. Just the way we like it.
Piezo rings in at $9.99, but having system level recording like that is well worth it.
