teenage engineering, the Swedish design firm that created several weird and beautiful gadgets like Panic’s game date gaming laptop and OP-1 music synthesizer, you have a new device to ogle. He TP-7 is a field recorder, designed to capture audio during interviews, sample sounds in nature, record musical performances, or capture voice memos.
It looks like a retro-futurist. minidisc or, as the designers probably intended, an old-school tape reel player. Retro aesthetics aside, Teenage Engineering’s gadgets are known for being absolutely packed with modern features. The TP-7 is no different. For starters, it has an accompanying transcription mode when synced with an iOS app, so your voice recordings can be converted to text.
The device is designed to nestle in the palm of your hand, so there’s a rocker along the side where your index and ring fingers would naturally rest. Hitting that rocker switch one way or the other allows you to fast forward or rewind audio playback. Yes, that disk in the center spins smoothly like a tape reel while the TP-7 is playing or recording. The movement is mostly for display (it’s all digital; there’s no actual tape there), but the wheel can be used to scroll through the audio by rapidly rotating it, or to pause the recording by grabbing it and stopping its movement. Unnecessary? Yes. Fresh? Okay, yes. It has seven hours of battery life and 128 gigabytes of internal storage for all your audio memories.
As cool as it looks and probably feels, it may not be the best option for your audio recording needs. The TP-7 does not have an XLR input, the standard connector type found on many professional microphones and other audio equipment. There’s an internal microphone built into the TP-7, of course, along with three 3.5mm inputs that will accept a typical aux cable. There is also a 1/4″ output that you can use to connect the recorder to fancy headphones or speakers. It’s also much, much more expensive than one of the standard audio recorders sold by industry leaders like Tascam or Zoom. The TP-7 costs $1,500, a record scratch. The company says it will launch sometime this summer.
Read on for more gadget news.
iPad Music and Video
In other audio production news, Apple is adding its previously desktop-only software professional logic and final cut pro on the iPad. The iPad has carved out a nice little niche for itself in the beat-making business with a rich library of music-making apps, so having the Logic digital audio workstation there makes perfect sense.
Apple is also making its Final Cut Pro video editing software available for the device. Both software suites have new controls and features that take advantage of the iPad’s touch screen. You can use multitouch to stretch and move clips, or change pitch and other audio settings in Logic. Both programs allow exporting to their respective desktop counterparts.
Each program is available as a subscription service for $5 per month or $50 per year.
Amazon anywhere, all at once
If you’ve ever felt that impulse buying on Amazon isn’t easy enough, good news: The retailer has a new service that lets you buy things while you play. Called amazon anywhereis a service that can be integrated into partner applications and virtual services to allow you to quickly buy things in real life.
The first game that works with Amazon Anywhere is Peridotby pokemon go Niantic creator. The game forces you to care for and interact with augmented reality creatures projected into the real world. (Think pokemon go meet Tamagotchi.) The way payments work is that you sync your Amazon account in-game, allowing you to spend real money to buy physical merchandise with your imaginary animals printed on it.
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