#evpr

Overview

Easy Voice Recorder Pro (EVPR) for Android OS is billed as a basic recording app, but it's a basic app with tons of uses at work, at home, and everywhere in between. What's more, in our testing, it turned out to be incredibly easy to use.

Although it's described as a voice recorder, the reality is that EVRP will record just about anything you throw at it. Certainly, it's particularly well designed for voice notes, taking just a couple taps to play back a quick recording that you made earlier. Yet with practically no time limit on recordings, this app is just as well suited to long projects: for recording business meetings, brainstorming sessions, dictations to the office assistant, classroom lectures, and things of that nature. It'll even record in the background while you do other things with your device. (Just be careful, though, not to put your hand over the microphone.)

Like a lot of Android apps, this one comes in two versions: Easy Voice Recorder (EVR), which is free, and Easy Voice Recorder Pro, priced at $2.99. Unlike most free Android apps though, EVR isn't either ad-supported or time-limited; it's free to use, with no real restrictions.

Why might you want to upgrade, then? The incentive comes from the fact that the Pro version has a few additional features, including the ability to boost the gain on the microphone of your device, resume previously stopped recordings, and exclude your recordings from being listed in the automatic Android "media scan" it uses to find music. Of these, the gain boost can be especially useful, as we'll talk about below.

Performance

EVRP is actually even simpler than we've made it sound already. The controls for record, pause, stop, and play are easy enough for practically anyone to handle right away.

The app lets you record to any one of three different audio formats: WAV, AAC, and AMR. Taking these in consecutive order, each will successively save you more space, while possibly costing you more quality. Still, even when using WAV at the default quality settings, you could record 9 hours of audio in just 1 GB of free storage. So you're not likely to get cramped by the size of a recording unless you're doing a personal narration of War and Peace!

In fact, the app will even tell you how much time you have left at the current settings, just so you're never caught unaware. If you choose the lower quality AMR, you're looking at 270 hours per GB!

In Google Play/Android Market, some users have complained about hearing a "crackle" at the beginning of a recording when using WAV format. We didn't experience this at all, though. (However, you do need to be careful where you put your fingers, since the sound of a fingertip hitting the microphone might sound like a crackle.) Meanwhile, through a recent update, EVRP now supports a custom gain for WAV files. 

Gain Boost: Great for Large Gatherings

With regard to the extra features in the Pro version, the gain boost, referred to as "camcorder mode," can be particularly helpful to anyone who who wants to record larger gatherings like meetings or lectures. Most Android devices can take an external microphone to improve the quality of a recording. Yet being able to go without one is just more convenient. You won't need to plan in advance to take a microphone along.

Whether you've recorded a big business strategy meeting, or a garage band trying out a new tune, it's easy to do something with a recording once you've made it. Sure, you can tap and hold on a recording to assign it a name or delete it. However, you can also share it by any means supported by Android for file transfer. That means email, Bluetooth, and Dropbox, to name a few. Just record, tap, and send. Then your recording will be archived for safekeeping. That one-hour business meeting will become a 120 MB recording saved where you can replay it at any time to check details or refresh your recollections.

In testing EVRP on a couple of Android OS phones, we only experienced one disappointment. Specifically, we found that not all devices support all of the recording formats. Yet since there's usually no real need to try anything other than WAV, that's not a big deal.

Conclusion

It's truly hard to find anything wrong with Easy Voice Recorder Pro. It's easy to use and easy to manage, but also feature-rich. It's an excellent addition to anyone's app toolbox, but particularly so for business users of every stripe.