The iPhone and iPad Blog by Simon

You’re getting bored with the plethora of audio and video recording apps available for iPhone.

You want something new, something that doesn’t make you wait for something interesting to happen, like Vine or Instagram does.

So in the realm of audio sharing, you’ll be pleasantly surprised with OverHeard – Share Your Sounds : it’s an app that lets you record sounds at the present moment as well as the immediate past, and lets you share them with peers, family, and other users.

It’s like what Snapchat does for imaging – introducing the art of authentic audio clips, minus the self-destructing mode however, you’ll be pleased to know. The app les you preserve three minutes of sound, regardless of where you are or the situation you are in.

How to use OverHeard for iOS

After installing and opening the app on your device, you can snip out a particular sound clip if you’re hearing something worth sharing. This is easier to do for audio then for video, unless you have a positioning device for the later.

However, you still have to place the iPhone in a position where it can detect and capture sounds well enough, such as in the shirt of your pocket.

OverHeard also acts as a social network, asking users to sign up for an account and granting permissions to activate background recording and access the microphone of your iPhone. Whether users will be interested in sharing 3-minute audio clips as much as they love sharing self-destructing images on Snapchat remains to be seen.

To change the time duration for each-recording phase, you can select one of the options from settings. The time limits are 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds ($0.99), and 180 seconds ($1.99).

Also, there are some audio effects available in the Settings menu, such as Miss Echo, Mr. Roboto, Miss Funk, Mr. Vader and Mr. Reverb.

And here’s the feature where OverHeard could rise as a social network: users can attach images and add some context to each sound-clip. The audio option is missing from Snapchat, so that is a bonus. You can follow a particular stream, or search for specific users using the search function. Audio-clips can be shared within the OverHeard network as well as on Facebook and Twitter.

Final thoughts

OverHeard is an interesting concept, but it remains to be known how well it would fare amongst iPhone users, till it gathers a decent user base. The app works on iOS 7.0 and above and is free to download. I am strictly against the app charging for the recording of 1 minute and 3 minute audio-recording though. How about you?

This article, OverHeard Is An Interesting Sound Recording and Sharing Social Network For iOS, was originally published at simonblog.com.