Apple’s Voice Memos app is getting simple multitrack recording

Apple just announced a forthcoming update to its popular Voice Memos app that brings multitrack recording, of a sort. It was announced at today’s iPhone event and looks pretty neat.

The demo shows a guitar player laying down a track and then, simply, singing on top of it. All of this is handled via the app. It looks like the magic stops at two tracks, but there’s a simple edit interface that lets you make adjustments to each layer.

There’s also some algorithmic and machine learning mojo happening under the hood, as the demo doesn’t show the user wearing headphones when singing on top of the guitar track. In the old days, doing overdubs without headphones would be a one-way ticket to a terrifying cacophony of noise.

Apple didn’t announce when this feature is coming or what iPhone models it would be available for. The recently-announced iPhone lineup features a new microphone array, which could enable this feature. We’ll update this post when we know more.

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