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Diff

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From: Middle of nowhere, Kansas

Joined: 2017-02-15

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apps

what apps do you guys have for cardiostuff on your phones? I've been using Easy Microphone for recording but it only records in wav which just gets massive if you're setting your phone to record overnight. And up until recently I was using the Cardiograph app to check what my heart rate was, turns out it has some pretty invasive permissions with no reason it should need them.

T145

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From: Oceania

Joined: 2017-02-17

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Re: apps

.wav is nice, since it's lossless, but given phone mic quality, you could probably go for something a good bit smaller.

Alternatively, you may be able to get away with using something like soundwire (costs money) to stream the sound to a computer to record, at which point, you wouldn't have the size limit.

I was using the Cardiograph app...

Can't you manually switch those off on a lot of the newer phones these days?

T145

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From: Oceania

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Re: apps

Yeah, some of them anyway. Older apps (Cardiograph isn't one of them) don't know how to handle being told "no" and will crash. But there are plenty of invasive things that can be done without requesting any special permissions. For example, accessing the internet. Just that can give you a very rough location, I think you can access cell tower info without any special permissions and that'll get you a pretty usable location, I believe you can see what apps are transferring data and how much without any permissions. You can see whether or not an app has access to personally identifying info, but you can't disallow them from taking it, and of course without the ability to restrict internet access it can all be broadcast to the world.

Alternatively, you may be able to get away with using something like soundwire (costs money) to stream the sound to a computer to record, at which point, you wouldn't have the size limit.

Or any of those apps that broadcast the mic through your headphones, just hook it up to your PC over bluetooth and you're set. That's what I've been doing for skype on my PC since the skype app is hot garbage.

Depends. I've found that I can get Cardiograph to behave part-way, but it stopped recognising the cameras properly at some point for some strange reason.   To be fair, you can get a lot of info on someone form something innocuous. For instance, you can get a good idea of someone's daily activities just with something like their heart rate, and match that up with rough locations/times/steps.   I don't disagree that the permissions system needs tightening, or a bit more detail. Would also be nice if people were given the option to spoof valid permissions, so that the app thinks it's got permissions, but it's not getting data/getting junk data.

paperpenguin

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Joined: 2017-02-17

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Re: apps

I can now vouch for the effectiveness of RecForge II Pro for Android recording. It's a paid app, unfortunately, at $3.29, but it's pretty good.

Advantages include:

• Records straight to MP3

• Records while the screen is locked

• Optional adjustable gain on the mic during a pre-recording preview stage

• Live monitoring mode (listen while you record)

• Can disable Automatic Gain Control on your phone if the volume swings are too wild with it on by default

On the flipside:

• It's a paid app which is a barrier to some (if not many)

• If you're using the live monitoring, you lock the screen and unlock, the monitoring shuts off and you have to re-enable it manually

• Getting it to record to the SD card instead of the internal memory can be a little tricky due to how the new Androids handle SD card permissions

There's a free version you can try before you buy, but it auto-pauses any compressed (mp3, m4a, ogg, wma, flac and opus) recordings every three minutes and needs to be resumed manually.

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I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those rap guys' girlfriends.