(Archived) FATAL DESIGN FLAW! - Lost memories bc of audio recording icons

[vanzeeben 0]

My wife and I recently took a trip to visit her grandfather who is 89. I was sitting in the living room of his home on my laptop when he started telling me some stories about growing up in Illinois, his time in WWII and the business that he ran in Southern CA for 40+ years as Southern CA started to develop. About 10 mins into his stories I remembered that I could just quick open up Evernote and start recording these stories to save for posterity. I opened up a new note and clicked the record button. I saw the button light up in red and so I put my laptop down and proceeded to ask him as many questions as I could think of.

About an hour and a half in, he took a break from talking to answer the phone so I quick went to upload the note just in case something happened to my laptop. Well, when I turned the screen back on, low-and-behold Evernote wasn't recording at all! It turns out that when you click the little microphone in Evernote, it shows a red "Save" button, which makes you think it's recording (see attached pic).

PLEASE EVERNOTE! SAVE PEOPLE'S MEMORIES FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS BY ELIMINATING THE DECEITFUL RED BUTTON WHEN IT'S NOT RECORDING!!!!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

i think the recording feature is poorly done as well. i am definitely not disputing your point. BUT, i would strongly recommend using a dedicated app like recorder pro (free) for such an important recording. the audio quality in evernote is not so great, because they are focused on keeping the file sizes small, and recorder pro is rock solid--you can have it running in the background and not worry about missing a thing.

[bluesgeek 12]

I had never used the audio recording before, so I tried it out.

Here's what happened. As with you, I clicked on the mic and got the red save button. When I pressed it, it saved an empty (?) audio file. I deleted the note. When clicking on the mic a subsequent new note, the behavior was that the red button appeared, but then quickly changed to the grey record button. When clicking on the mic on all subsequent new notes, I never saw the red save button.

It would seem to make sense that the save button should never appear before recording has started.

This seems a bit buggy.

I'm sorry you lost those stories, vanzeeben. I know what I treasure it is when one of our treasured elderly loved ones opens up like that.

[bluesgeek 12]

Also, convention would seem to dictate that Record is red, and Save would be the grey one. The way it is configured can be, in itself, confusing.

[dlu 628]

So sorry to hear about that. It looks like there was some sort of hiccup. What you should get after you hit the Audio button, you should get a blue button that says record.

Blue Button that says Record

After you hit the blue button, it should start recording and give you the red button that says save. After you hit the red save button, it saves your note and the audio it was recording.

It sounds like for whatever reason it never started recording even though it was supposed to. It also looks like you're able to get this behavior to happen more than once. I'll have the team look at this.

[bluesgeek 12]

In this vid cap you can see the red Save button come up briefly before the blue Record button. You can also see that it doesn't happen after the first load.

As I mentioned, I've also had it happen that I never see a record button, only the save button, and that clicking it, saves an audio file. I'm sorry to report that I can't seem to get that to repeat.

And while you're fixing it... red for record, blue for save, please.

Evernote save before record.mov

[vineetw 21]

Thanks for the report - case #6188/#6189 have been filed