Portable Mic to Capture Quality Audio on Your iOS Device

Audio makes a world of difference. Whether you’re shooting a video of a school concert, your kid’s baseball game or — ahem — your cat doing something mundanely adorable, the overall sound quality of your footage is really what makes it or breaks it.



California-based company Blue Microphones recently released Mikey Digital — a portable microphone for your iOS devices. The plug-and-play stereo mic promises to capture professional-sounding recordings for any videos you shoot.
“It enables you to capture anything with really good clarity,” Brian Biggott, chief technology officer at Blue Microphones, tells Mashable. “Most microphones have a sweet spot, and outside of that they sound really bad, but we’re able to do pretty much anything with this product. It works with any app or video function out there.”

The light-weight device clips directly into the dock port. It has three gain settings (high, medium and low), which are identified by lights on the front. The gain settings refer to the sensitivity of the microphone: the higher the sensitivity is set, the better it will pick up quiet sounds — conversely, the lower setting picks up louder sounds more clearly.
“The middle setting is what I think folks will use most of the time. That’s kind of for ‘normal’ sounds, a mix of quiet and loud,” Biggott says. “But if you know you’re going to be in a really loud environment, like a loud concert, the low gain setting will capture the sounds much better.”

An additional perk with the Mikey Digital is its auxiliary input. Guitar players can plug cables directly into the device through the input and sync their instruments with a number of recording apps, which give users an experience similar to having thousands of pedals and cabinets to work with.
“There are great music and creation apps out there, like Garageband and FiRe 2,” he says, “so when you combine them with a Mikey and an iOS device, you’ve got a pretty killer set up, whether you’re doing video or music.”
The Mikey Digital is compatible with all iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices. Unfortunately, a lightning adapter is required for the iPhone 5 and iPad mini. The adapters, which connect the new 8-pin chargers to the older, 30-pin models, are available for $29 through Apple.
It was originally released in 2008 for strictly iPod devices, but has since changed its compatibility to accommodate the iOS spectrum. The newest edition, just released last month, features the auxiliary jack.
“It’s not only a microphone, it’s an interface,” Biggott says. “It’s really a one-stop recording solution for doing things on the go.”

You can get one for $93.32 through Amazon.com.