Comments on: Evernote for Songwriting: Song & Story

By: Mona

Mona — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:58:07 +0000

Thanks for sharing this very helpful article

By: Jason Dahl

Jason Dahl — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:19:17 +0000

How are you sharing Stacks? I am in much the same business as you, and my songwriters and I are trying to transition from another, more complicated task manager.
For us, if I create and share a Notebook, it only can appear unsorted in my collaborator’s Evernote. I would LOVE to be able to share a Stack as a stack!

By: bduffy3000

bduffy3000 — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:42:19 +0000

I’m curious: you say your wife and you “share multiple notebooks which are divided into two Notebook Stacks”, but can’t you only see individual, un-stacked Notebooks in the “Shared” column under one name?

My brother and I are starting to use Evernote for a demo song business, but we’re frustrated with the forced separation of Shared Notebooks, and no Stacking.

By: paulplaysguitar

paulplaysguitar — Wed, 02 May 2012 04:27:42 +0000

Cool song… I don’t know how any songwriter can stand Evernote’s audio quality. Honestly, I might as well do my demos on an original 90′s era Talkboy™.

Seriously though, I did the math and you can record almost 9 hours of audio at Evernote’s compression settings without surpassing the 50mb file size limit. Who needs 9 hours of record time???

Please allow switchable audio quality… pretty please????

By: Aubrey McGowan

Aubrey McGowan — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:47:41 +0000

You guys can go to http://songandstory.com/songs and check out even more songs that we have written to tell other compelling stories!

By: richard

richard — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:51:52 +0000

good suggestion guys, .. recording it with the iPhone recording tool and then email it … just never thought about that option

By: Aubrey McGowan

Aubrey McGowan — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:48:33 +0000

Tiago, I agree. The audio embedded audio in Evernote is not the best of quality, but we use our voice memo app and then email it to our account. And now you can send emails directly to specific notebooks in Evernote by using the “@” symbol and the name of the folder (i.e. “@songs in progress). This is such an awesome feature! I think all of the other advantages of using Evernote definitely outweigh the lack of audio quality.

Who knows? Maybe we can petition for better audio quality together? Hint hint…

Keep creating!

Aubrey

By: Travis

Travis — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:30:44 +0000

I agree with Tiago. My work-around with this is to record using my iPhone’s voice memo app and then email the file to my Evernote address. This can later be either linked or merged with a previous note, but it’s certainly a more involved process than simply hitting record in Evernote and being done with it. I know other songwriters who have chosen not to use Evernote specifically for the lack of audio quality. Really, the voice memo app is only turning out 64kbps which is still fairly compact. In comparison to the 13kbps that Evernote records at, 64kbps is worlds ahead in terms of usefulness for a songwriter. Extremely low bitrate is passable when recording a thought, a conversation, or a lecture. When one is recording a song idea where a moment of inspiration combines melody with lyrics set over the top of some instrumental harmonic structure, the need for higher degree of nuance (read: detail granted by higher quality audio) is much increased.

I’m wondering if the solution could be something as simple as offering an audio quality setting within the mobile apps? This could be as user friendly as two options: “efficient” (13kbps) and “detailed” (64kbps or higher). I am not sure where the level of diminishing returns kicks in with bitrate vs quality given that our audio sources is a mobile phone, but Evernote could possibly further set itself apart from the pack if it could record with even higher quality than the native voice memo app. A 64kbps setting would still be a welcome improvement if that happens to be a necessary limitation of the device(s) or if that is where bitrate and quality ideally balance out given the medium we are using.

Thanks for all that you guys do!

By: Tiago

Tiago — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:50:22 +0000

Yes, evernote is a great tool and I love it, but as a musician I found the audio clips sound quality very disappointing on Evernote app for iPhone. It would great if it could match the audio quality of iPhone’s native app “Voice Memos” that has a good sound generating small files size.