TinyVox Pro Review

TinyVox claims it's to audio what TwitPic is to twitter pictures. So far as I can tell, there's isn't an overwhelming audience for sharing audio messages online - however, podcasts are very popular, so I thought I'd give it a shot and review it. Besides, while fairly new, it's risen in popularity quite quickly.

The concept is simple: it's an audio recorder, with the added neat visual gimmick of a tape-deck spinning as you record. I tested both the normal ad-supported version and the $1.99 Pro version, and found little difference between the two, besides the recording page layout. Even the ads in the original version were non-invasive, and barely noticeable. Both versions let you record up to 25 minutes in 'regular quality' or 8 minutes in 'high quality.' Both versions allow you to send your 'tape' as a link (hosted on tinyvox.com) via Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr, Or email yourself an actual mp3. Keep in mind you need to set your Tape Name before you record; once saved it cannot be edited - and this is the text that will be used for your tweet, or in your Facebook Status, which is the first issue I had with this app.

While I don't dispute the usefulness of being able to record and email yourself notes, or even upload these to your Evernote (via email) or Dropbox (if you have a SendToDropbox email account) but this is not going to be the reason people use it. In fact, you can already do all of these things with the iPhone's built in audio recorder - the only difference is the files are in m4a format instead of mp3.

What this app needs to really set it apart is to have deeper social networking integration. It's simply not going to be useful enough to send a link to your Facebook Wall that's of an audio file - it should embed it on your wall for people to listen to from their news feed. It's not quite enough to just upload a file to a site - you should be able to link all your uploads in a unified account - so all your TinyVox's are linked, like how TwitPic does.

This is the main reason that TinyVox is not the audio version of TwitPic. But that doesn't mean it can't be.

Until they can update these slight issues, I would strongly suggest using the free version. It's a decent app, and could be very useful and popular, I just don't think it's quite there yet.