Audio Recorder

Two jobs, one recorder

Most voice recorders give you one long file and leave you to find your way back into it. This one is built around the two things people actually do with a recording when they are preparing to speak.

Listening to someone else. A talk, a discussion, a class. You are not trying to keep every word — you are trying to catch the three or four moments worth answering. Tap Mark when one goes by, and the recorder remembers where it was.

Rehearsing yourself. Paste what you plan to say, pick the setting you are saying it in, and say it out loud against that clock. Then hear it back. Reading a comment silently tells you nothing about how it lands; hearing your own voice tells you almost everything.

Getting to it

• Go straight to comment.coach/record.
• From the Dashboard, the recording tile.
• On a phone, the + in the bar at the bottom. It opens the dashboard's list of what you can start — recording is one of them — rather than assuming you meant to type.
• From the main menu, beside the Meeting Timer.

Pinning a memo to where you made it

Some voice notes are about a place — where you parked, a sign you want to read again, the shop you meant to come back to. After you stop, under the name field, 📍 Add where I am attaches the coordinate to the recording.

It is off unless you tap it. Nothing about your location is collected while you record, or at any other time.

• Give it a name you will understand. The coordinate is stored; the words are yours. “Level 3, blue section” will mean more next week than a street address would.
• Tap the coordinate to open it in whatever map app you already use.
• Remove takes it off again, any time before you save.

It is rounded to about ten metres on the way in. That is enough to find a car park and not enough to point at a front door, and the exact reading your phone gave is discarded rather than stored — so it cannot be shared later, by you or by anyone you send it to.

Sending a pinned memo is a choice you make each time. If a recording has a location, the send panel offers to include it, ticked, with a reminder that anyone you send it to — and anyone they forward it to — will see where it was made. Untick it and the card goes out exactly like any other. If you do include it, whoever opens the card gets the pin properly, not a line of text to copy out.

Your recordings

My recordings lists everything on this device with how much space they take. Tap one to listen. Under each row:

• Share — on a phone, hands the audio to WhatsApp, Messages, email, anything that accepts a file.
• Coaching card — see below.
• Transcribe — turns it into a subject you can comment on.
• Download — the plain audio file.
• Delete — asks once, then removes it.

Past four recordings a search box and an order appear. Search matches names and the notes inside recordings, because what you remember is usually the thing you wrote down rather than what you called the file. The ☆ keeps a recording at the top of every order but one.

Arrange turns on the arrows, so you can put recordings in the sequence you mean to say them. That order is the one exception to the star: in a running order the sequence is the content, and floating a favourite to the top would rearrange the talk.

Select turns on the checkboxes, and then you can act on several at once. Play in order runs them back to back — with Loop if you want the sequence to come round again — and Join into one welds them into a single recording.

Sending a recording to someone

There are two ways out, and which one you want depends on the machine you are sitting at.

On a phone, use Share. The recording goes into the share sheet like any other file and lands in whatever app you pick. This is the good path, and it is what phones are built for.

On a computer, make a coaching card. A card is a single web page file with the audio inside it and your notes laid out beneath, each with its timestamp — plus a line from you at the top if you want one. You send that one file however you normally send files. Opened on a computer, it plays. Opened anywhere at all, it reads: the notes and their times are the document, and the player is a bonus on top.

Being sent one

If someone sends you a card, you can just open it — on a computer it plays straight away, with no app and no account. If you want to keep it, open comment.coach/record, choose Add a shared recording, and pick the file. It joins your own library with their notes and timestamps intact, and from there it behaves exactly like something you recorded yourself: scrub it, jump between their marks, transcribe it, send it on.

You can drop the file anywhere on the recorder page instead.

A recording that did not come from here

Any ordinary audio file works: an .m4a, .mp3, .wav, whatever someone sent you of a talk they gave. There are three ways in, and they all do the same thing: Add a recording at the top of your library, the same on the opening screen, or drop the file anywhere on the page.

It is measured as it arrives — its true length, and the same waveform the recorder would have drawn — so it behaves exactly like one made here: drag to scrub, change the speed, loop a passage. And you can mark it. Play it, tap ❓ Ask about when something needs a question, write a note on it, and you have a critique with timestamps that you can send back as a coaching card.

Rehearsing a whole talk, not one comment

Once a subject has points and you have chosen which comment says each one, its outline offers Rehearse N points. That walks the whole thing in the order you will actually say it — down through each main point and its sub-points, not all the headings and then all the detail — and records each one as its own take.

Only points you have decided are included. A point still holding three drafts you have not picked between is left out rather than guessed at: the count on the button tells you how much of the talk is actually ready, which is usually the more useful number.

• As you go, a bar shows where you are: point 3 of 7, what this point was allotted, and what the whole talk was allotted.
• When you finish, the takes are already in order in your library, and Play in order plays the talk back end to end. Nothing to arrange by hand.
• Stopping early is fine. Every take you have made is kept.

The useful part is the arithmetic. A stopwatch tells you one comment ran long. The outline tells you the talk is four minutes over and shows you which point is spending it.

Turning a recording into something you can work on

Transcribe takes a recording and makes a subject out of it: the words, cleaned up and split into sections you can comment on one by one, with the audio kept as the reference. That is the bridge from “I recorded the talk” to “I have a comment prepared on paragraph nine”.

That step uses AI, so it needs an account and a connection. Everything before it does not.

Keeping them safe

Recordings live in this browser and nowhere else. That is the privacy promise and it is also the risk: a browser can clear its own storage when space runs short, and clearing site data takes them with it.

• Install the app. Adding Comment Coach to your Home Screen or desktop is what lets the browser mark your storage as protected. The recorder tells you which state you are in.
• Download all as a zip. At the foot of your library. One file with every recording in it, properly named and dated. This is the backup.