A field recording tool for the people who listen to places.
Field listens to where you've been. When a recording sounds different from the others you've made in a place, it lets you know — and you decide whether to mark it.
The word comes from R. Murray Schafer's acoustic ecology, a framework for hearing places by what makes them sound like themselves.
The ideas behind Field
Field measures every recording: loudness, true peak, dynamic range, spectral character, spaciousness, activity. Read it as a phrase ("warm and expansive," "steady and intimate"), or as numbers in any DAW that reads BWF metadata.
Pull up any recording and Field finds the others that sound like it — the same kind of acoustic moment from across your library.
Capture & identification
Record in WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC, or AAC at up to 96 kHz / 32-bit. CD, Broadcast, and Studio quality tiers — you choose the resolution.
On-device AI listens as you record and tags sounds in real time: birdsong, wind, rain, traffic, voices. Tags refine after each recording.
On-device speech recognition runs as you record, transcribing your spoken observations live and saving them alongside the audio. Imported files and the pre-roll seconds get transcribed too, so nothing spoken slips through.
Record while walking and Field traces the route, then scans the audio for the moments that stand out from everything else you've recorded. Walked path lights up as you play it back.
Bring existing audio into Field from Voice Memos, JustPressRecord, Files, or any audio app's share menu. Imports get the same automatic tags, fingerprints, transcripts, and Soundmark candidacy as native captures.
Start a recording without opening the app — from your Apple Watch, a Home or Lock Screen widget, Control Center, or the Action Button. A Watch complication shows whether a recording's running and starts one from your wrist.
Field Pro
Field names the birds it hears, species by species — running entirely on your phone, with nothing uploaded. Bird identification is available only for recordings made in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Video Export · Field Pro
An American goldfinch, recorded in Field.
On your device
Sound ID, bird species, soundmarks, acoustic fingerprints — all of it computed on your device while you record, from your own library. No account, no upload, no server to wait for. The dawn chorus in a canyon with no bars gets the same treatment as a recording made at home.
Field. Pro
$5.99 once. No subscription.
Everything else in Field stays free — forever. Pro adds:
Capture the seconds before you tap record. Field buffers up to the last 30 seconds, held in memory and never uploaded, so the run-up is there when you hit record.
Organize recordings by project, trip, or session.
Your library syncs across your devices through your own iCloud account. Audio downloads on demand when you open a recording; metadata syncs immediately.
Rules-based collections that update themselves. Filter by tag, place, soundmark status, duration, or any combination.
Tune how confident Field needs to be before adding each individual tag.
Set in and out points, preview the edit, save as new or replace.
Drop timestamped markers during playback. Add labels, tap to jump. Exported as DAW markers.
Export recordings as Reaper sessions with tag-derived markers in place.
Share recordings as waveform videos in 16:9, 1:1, or 9:16 with optional title and location overlay.
Privacy
Sound identification, transcription, and analysis run entirely on your device. Field has no servers and never sees your recordings. Everything stays on your device unless you turn on iCloud Sync, and even then, your sync runs through your own iCloud account, not ours.
FAQ
Yes, with Field Pro — but only for recordings made in the San Francisco Bay Area. Field names the birds it hears entirely on-device, and nothing is uploaded.
Recording and the core features are free. Field Pro is a one-time purchase — no subscription — that adds pre-roll capture, folders & collections, iCloud sync, bird species identification, trimming, timestamped bookmarks, and more.
Yes. Recording, sound identification, bird identification, live transcription, and acoustic analysis all run on your device. Only iCloud sync needs a connection.
WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC, and AAC, at up to 96 kHz / 32-bit. You choose the resolution per recording.
Yes — from Voice Memos, Files, or any app's share sheet. Imported audio gets the same automatic tags, acoustic fingerprints, and transcripts as recordings made in Field.
No. Field has no servers and never sees your recordings. Processing is on-device, and optional iCloud sync runs through your own iCloud account, not ours.
Support
Bug reports, feature requests, and ways to make this even better.
Recently shipped
Pre-roll now reaches back up to 30 seconds. Imported recordings are transcribed automatically, and the pre-roll seconds are transcribed along with the rest. Also in 1.9: a System theme, and cleaner GPS tracks.
Turn on Pre-roll and Field captures the few seconds before you tap record, so you catch the moment you were already reacting to. Also in 1.8: clearer, more resilient iCloud sync.
Bird species identification for the San Francisco Bay Area. Also lossless ALAC recording and export, a Home and Lock Screen record widget, and iCloud sync for recording photos.
Start a recording without opening the app, from Control Center, a Live Activity, or an Apple Watch complication that records from your wrist.
Record while walking and Field traces your route, then finds the moments that stand out from everything else you've recorded. Plus true stereo capture from the built-in mic array, and Action Button support.
Automatic detection of a place's most distinctive moments, the sounds that mark where you are, surfaced from everything you've recorded there.