Apple’s recent iPhone event brought some great ideas to the table, from the camera button to the new invention of Google Lens and beyond. The company also announced that it was bringing simple multitrack recording to Voice Memos. This was especially exciting for me because, well, I use Voice Memos a lot. I have about 500 of these short recordings made during the lifetime of my iPhone 14 Pro and thousands more in the cloud. You never know when you might need a random tune you hummed while waiting for the subway in 2013.
So this feature felt made for me. I write songs. I play guitar. I do everything the woman in the ad does, including opening the fridge late at night for no real reason.
Then reality set in. This isn’t a software update that will come to all iPhone models. It’s tied to the ultra-premium iPhone 16 Pro, which starts at $1,000. I don’t want to upgrade just yet, so the dream of singing to an acoustic guitar track on the Voice Memos app is over.
Why is this special feature hidden behind the iPhone 16 Pro? It’s a simple multitrack recording function. The ad makes it seem like the app can’t even layer more than two tracks at a time. That can’t be cumbersome at all for the A18 Pro chip, especially since the phone can also handle 4K/120 FPS video recording in Dolby Vision.
Pro Tools, a popular digital audio workstation, was first introduced in 1991. That was two years before Intel released the Pentium chip. Computers of the era had no trouble layering tracks. For a bit of context, last year’s A17 Pro chip had about 19 billion transistors. An original Pentium chip had about three million transistors. In other words, a modern smartphone chip is about 6,300 times more powerful than a 1993 Pentium-based PC.
So let’s layer tracks on Voice Memos, Apple! It can’t be that complicated. I’ve been using dedicated multitrack apps since the iPhone 3. Apple ships GarageBand with every iPhone. Both GarageBand and third-party recording apps have their place, but nothing beats Voice Memos’ quickness and ease of use. It would certainly be great to be able to create a quick and dirty acoustic demo of a song and send it to someone, without having to navigate a complicated interface.
Yes. I see the elephant in the room. There’s one part of the ad I’ve been avoiding. The woman records the vocal layer on the guitar track without wearing headphones. She just stands in front of that refrigerator and sings into the phone.
Now, this is something the old-school Pentium couldn’t do. There’s some microphone placement wizardry going on there, as well as machine learning algorithms that reduce unwanted ambient noise. The iPhone 16 Pro has a brand new microphone array, so I imagine older models won’t be able to handle this particular part of the equation.
But who cares? This is a really cool feature. It’s also completely unnecessary. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already wearing earbuds/headphones or have some on you. Record the first track without headphones. Record the secondary layer while wearing headphones. That’s it. Problem solved. You can even do it in front of the refrigerator.
Also, both the bass-level iPhone 16 and Pro support audio mixes, which let people adjust different sound levels from different sources after capturing a video. This is done without the new studio mics on the iPhone 16 Pro and it seems to reduce ambient noise in a similar way. So it might be possible that there’s a software solution here to handle that elephant in the room as well. After all, the company credits “powerful machine learning algorithms” for this technology – if it can wipe out environmental wind noise, surely it can handle music playing in the background too?
So I’m once again asking Apple to let us all play around with multitrack recording on Voice Memos. There’s no reason why every older iPhone model can’t make its way into a simple guitar/vocal two-track wav file. Put this feature in a software update. I hear one for iOS 18 is coming very soon, and then another for Apple Intelligence.