Mikme Pocket Promises To Change The Way You Record With Your Phone
Most in the mobile industry today are obsessed with cameras and picture quality. That's fine when you're taking stills or even for barely audible videos. But when you need quality audio to go with your video, many resort to ginormous contraptions many times bigger than their smartphones. Mikme (pronounced as "mic me") has been trying to revolutionize the audio landscape in the mobile market for years and their latest Mikme Pocket may be their most ambitious one yet.
When talking about mobile journalism or cinematography, most presume these creators do everything with just their phones. While that is a cinch for video, audio presents a physics problem. The phone's mic is usually with the one recording, away from the audio source. Thus, the audio can degrade while traveling even short distances and can get out of sync with the video as well.
Mikme's solution has been to offload the audio recording to a separate device that stays with or near the subject instead of the recorder. While previous generations focused on creating the perfect wireless mic, the Mikme Pocket is all about portability and versatility. And it does so by being a recorder for wireless clip-on mics. What the black block does is to wirelessly transmit that audio to your smartphone.
It's no simple wireless recording and transmission, however. In addition to assuring a patented Quality of Service wireless protocol to ensure, well, quality, the Mikme Pocket also keeps a record of the audio on its 16 GB internal memory. Not only does this serve as a backup but also helps match up the two copies of the audio when the copy on the phone gets out of sync.
Part of the Mikme Pocket's magic is the smartphone app, available for iOS and, soon, Android as well. It lets you control two Micme Pockets, sync audio with video recorded on the phone, and monitor gain and audio levels. You can even quickly make edits right in the app and immediately upload it to social media.
As with previous Mikme's, the Mikme Pocket is starting out on Kickstarter, where it already got past its nearly $46,000 (40,000 EUR) funding goal in just a few hours. For an early bird price of $279, you get one Mikme Pocket, a Mikme clip-on Mic, and a 12-month subscription to the Pro version of the mobile app. Should all things go well, the Mikme Pocket will ship to backers in December, hopefully just in time to record the holiday festivities.