What you make

Recordings

Audio, where it lives, and how it attaches to a song.

A recording is a piece of audio. You make one by recording in the app, or by importing a file you already have.

Every recording either belongs to a song or does not yet. Both kinds appear in the Recordings tab, which is a list of all your audio regardless of where it came from.

See The Recordings tab for that list and its controls.

The two ways audio gets created#

Recorded inside a song. Open a song, record, and the audio is attached to that song from the moment you stop. It also shows up in the Recordings tab.

Recorded or imported on its own. Record from the Start tab, or import a file into the Recordings tab, and there is no song to attach it to yet. It sits in Recordings unattached.

The record sheet mid-take, showing a running timer and a waveform — Recording from the Start tab. There is no song attached yet.

Telling the two apart#

The label on a row is the fastest way to know which kind you are looking at.

An unattached recording expanded in the Recordings tab, labelled Song Idea, with New Song and Add to Song buttons — An unattached recording is labelled Song Idea and carries two buttons for fixing that.

An unattached recording says Song Idea and offers New Song and Add to Song. Once it belongs to a song, the label becomes the song's name and both buttons disappear, because there is nothing left to decide.

Attaching one to a song#

Add to Song opens a picker of everything you have written.

The Assign Recording screen listing songs to attach the recording to — Or create a new song from here, with the audio already on it.

The same recording after assignment, now labelled with the song name and with no Add to Song button — After assigning. The row now names the song instead of saying Song Idea.

What you can do to a recording#

Tap a recording to expand it, and a ⋯ button appears with everything you can do to it. The pencil beside the title renames it.

Action	What it does
Export	Sends the audio out of the app, through the iOS share sheet. This is the only way to get a take onto your computer.
Unlink from Lyrics	Breaks the tie between a take and the specific lines it was anchored to. Only appears when there is a link to break.
Archive	Takes it out of the list without deleting it. Becomes Unarchive afterwards.
Delete	Permanent, and it asks first.

Archived recordings live in their own list, the same way archived songs do. An empty one says No Archived Recordings.

Transcription#

Recordings can be transcribed to text. That is what Freestyle is built around: you sing or speak, and the words come back as lyrics you can edit.

Transcription needs a network connection and recording does not, so a network problem costs you the words and not the audio. A recording made with nothing to hear says Transcription unavailable, which is honest rather than broken.

What gets stored#

Audio is stored as M4A. Files you import in other formats are converted to M4A during import, which is why a large WAV becomes a much smaller file once it is in the app. The conversion happens on your device.

Recording length is capped per recording, and total storage is capped per account. The free plan holds 60 minutes in total with each take capped at 5 minutes. Current numbers for both plans are on Plan limits.

Deleting recordings you no longer need frees the space back up.