Introducing AudioMarks — simple audio annotations

What AudioMarks is

AudioMarks is an app I created with the help of AI assistance to scratch an itch: I would often hear something interesting in a piece of music and want to note it down, only to have nowhere to do it.

This app allows you to add a personal annotation to any piece of playing music, be it a file playing from the device, streaming through YouTube, or a podcast playing in another app.

It saves the annotations to file so they can be easily backed up or moved from phone to phone.

What inspired it

My side-gig is Music Director for the Dundas Concert Band. While I like to say that I get to wave a baton around for money, the truth is there’s a lot of musical preparation that goes into a performance. This includes weekly rehearsal work with the talented musicians who make up the ensemble, as well as score preparation, source music research and analysis, and active and passive listening of recordings.

I know many conductors who do their score preparation simply by reading the score and playing along on a piano. In fact, many older scores are written this way: condensed voices in concert pitch. Modern scores are written in transposed pitch (the native pitch of the instruments they are representing), which makes playing them on a piano harder.

For me, I like to listen to a source recording while doing my score preparation. It allows me to internalize the music faster while following along in the score. Different performances of the same piece often provide useful variation in interpretation.

Crucially, however, listening to music and looking at a score demand attention from two different parts of my brain. It often meant that I was missing some of the more subtle colour and detail that composers and arrangers had put in — the very thing that makes a performance more than the sum of its parts!

I realized this whenever I found myself listening to music in isolation (e.g. driving, doing the dishes). I would hear a secondary voice, contrary motion, a grating dissonance transforming into a glorious resolution, and have absolutely nowhere to note it down!

This is where AudioMarks comes in. It’s an app I wrote that reduces the friction of this process to zero. Just start writing down what you hear, and add the annotation at the exact point in the audio file.

Here are the basic features:

• Minimal player at the top (lets you rewind 3/10/30/all the way), seek, play/pause
  • Musicians often like to listen to interesting sections over and over. Fat-fingering a seek bar was out of the question.
• Configure storage folder (for the annotations themselves)
• A live list of annotations — clicking on each annotation skips the player over to that section, long press to edit
• Minimal input box to add new annotations at current playing time

Sold! How do I get it?

The source code is hosted here on GitHub. The Releases page contains the actual .apk files that you can download and install onto your phone.

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