Apple’s recent iPhone event unveiled some nifty ideas, from a camera button to a reinvention of Google Lens. The company also announced that it’s introducing simple multi-track recording to Voice Memos. This was especially exciting for me because I use Voice Memos a lot. I have nearly 500 of these little recordings I’ve made over the life of my iPhone 14 Pro, with thousands more in the cloud. You never know when you’ll need that random song you hummed while waiting for the subway in 2013.
So I felt like this feature was made for me. I write songs. I play guitar. I do everything the women in commercials do, including opening the fridge late at night for no particular reason.
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Then reality hit: this isn’t a software update that applies to all iPhone models. It concerns the ultra-premium iPhone 16 Pro, which starts at a whopping $1,000. I’m not looking to upgrade anytime soon, so my dream of singing along to acoustic guitar tracks in the Voice Memos app is now out of reach.
Why is this feature not on the iPhone 16 Pro? It’s a simple multi-track recording feature. Looking at the ad, it looks like the app can’t even layer more than two tracks at a time. There’s no way this is taxing the A18 Pro chip, especially since the phone can also handle 4K/120 FPS video recording with Dolby Vision.
Pro Tools, the popular digital audio workstation, was first introduced in 1991, two years before Intel released the Pentium chip. Computers of that era had no problem layering tracks. For reference, last year’s A17 Pro chip had about 19 billion transistors. The original Pentium chip had about 3 million transistors. That means a modern smartphone chip is about 6,300 times more powerful than a Pentium-based PC from 1993.
Hey Apple, let’s overlay a track onto a Voice Memo. It shouldn’t be that complicated. I’ve been using a dedicated multitrack app since the iPhone 3, and Apple includes GarageBand with every iPhone. While both GarageBand and third-party recording apps are certainly useful, nothing beats the speed and ease of use of Voice Memos. It would be really nice to be able to quickly create a simple acoustic demo of a song to send to someone without having to navigate a fairly complicated interface.
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Yeah, I see the elephant in the room. There’s the part of the ad I’ve been avoiding. The woman is recording a vocal layer over a guitar track without headphones. She’s standing in front of a refrigerator and singing into a phone. Now, this is something that couldn’t be done on an old Pentium. There’s some mic placement magic at work there, along with machine learning algorithms that reduce unwanted ambient noise. The iPhone 16 Pro has an all-new microphone array, so I understand that older models might not be able to handle this particular part.
But who cares? It’s a really cool feature, and totally unnecessary. If you’re reading this, you probably already have earphones/headphones on or within reach. Record the first track without headphones. Record the second layer with headphones on. And that’s it. Problem solved. You can now record in front of the fridge.
Additionally, both the base iPhone 16 and Pro models support Audio Mix, allowing you to adjust the different volumes from different sound sources after you’ve shot a video. This is done without the iPhone 16 Pro’s new studio microphones, which seem to reduce ambient noise as well. That means there could be a software solution that can handle even this big problem. After all, the company attributes the tech to “powerful machine learning algorithms.” If it can eliminate environmental wind noise, it should be able to handle music playing in the background, too.
So I am once again asking Apple to let us all try out multi-track recording in Voice Memos. There is no reason why older iPhone models can’t computationally create a two-track WAV file of guitar and vocals. I hope this feature will be included in a software update. I hear an update for iOS 18 is coming soon, followed by an update for Apple Intelligence.
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