Monle

I really think that Monle is the best editing application for mobile journalism, if only because of its multitrack editing format. If you’re used to editing in multitrack, you’re going to be incredibly frustrating with some of the other audio editing applications. Monle does allow you to fade clips in and out of each other.

You can overlap clips and control the volume of each individual clip. It works well if you’re planning on doing a voiceover for a slideshow, radio piece, or podcast it would be perfect, but you can’t use too many audio bites or the application glitches. Also, the clips can’t be too long or the application doesn’t handle them well. Basically, keep it short and simple.

You can’t add audio from other programs stored elsewhere on your iPhone, so if you decide to go with this application be sure to record in Monle. You can’t bring in exterior songs from iTunes either. You can audiocopy and audiopaste between apps, but only certain applications use this function. You can also upload or download to/from an FTP host, but at times it’s difficult to get the finished audio off the program. It offers a really helpful video that communicates exactly how to work the editing functions and the capturing functions. Without these, the program would’ve taken even longer to warm up to.

It’s not difficult to learn but it’s definitely quicker to watch the video than to go through trial and error. I still ran into complications while trying to edit. The application closed on me multiple times. If this happens, you’ve lost everything you’ve been working on unless you saved your session. I highly recommend saving frequently. I also had an issue when I tried to delete a large portion of a clip. The program would freeze on me, and I would have to let it rest for a few minutes before I opened it again. This starts to happen more as you add clips to the session.

I feel like this application has potential in the future, it just needs more updates. It has some flaws right now but after they’re worked out it might be one of the most useful field editing tools.