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One take, no edits
There is no cutting and no pasting in the field recorder, and that is on purpose. You cannot stitch the best bits of several takes together or patch over a wrong note - what you play is what goes out. We want your one-take wonder.
Everybody records with the same simple setup, so every field recording is a fair, honest snapshot of a musician playing live, right there and then. That real live attempt is exactly what we cherish about it.
Recording a new track
Starting a brand-new track - a template other musicians can play along with - is the easy part. Open the "Create" tab, hit record and play. There is no backing track to keep in step with, so there is nothing to align afterwards.
Recording along with a track
You can also open any track in the app and hit record on its page to add your part to it, just like a remix on the website. This is where it gets a little more demanding: the backing you hear while playing and the part you record have to line up in time. If they do not, your playing ends up dragging behind the groove, even though it felt perfectly in time while you played.
The next sections explain where that delay comes from and how to get rid of it.
Use headphones, not the speaker
Playing the backing track through your phone's speaker while you record is really not advisable. The microphone picks the speaker up, and the backing bleeds into your recording far too much - it ends up in your track a second time, slightly out of place, and muddies the whole mix.
So we strongly suggest using headphones.
Wired headphones are ideal: they add little to no delay, so what you hear is what the phone plays, right then.
Bluetooth earbuds are what most of us carry, and they work too - but they add quite a bit of delay to the playback. You hear the backing late, you play in time with what you hear, and so your recording comes out late as well. Depending on your Bluetooth gear, that delay can be anywhere from 250 to 500 milliseconds, which is easily enough to throw a groove off.
Adjust timing and auto calibration
The app has two ways to deal with that delay.
"Adjust timing" is available once you have finished a recording. It lets you set or change a time offset that shifts your recording against the backing track, until the two line up.
Auto calibration measures the delay of your headphones for you. The app offers it on your first recording attempt, and you can also run it after a recording. Turn your earbuds up to full volume and hold them close to your phone's microphone: the app plays a few beeps through them, listens for them and works out how much delay your Bluetooth connection adds. That delay is then used as the offset.
Tip: clap first
A simple way to get the delay sorted before your real take: record a short test in which you just clap along to the beat of a backing track. Handclaps are much easier to line up with the groove by ear than a melodic instrument is - you hear straight away whether they sit on the beat or trail behind it. Once your claps sit right, you know the timing works with your headphones.Drafts and publishing
When you are done, you can keep a recording as a local draft in the app, to listen to it again or finish it later, or publish it to wikiloops. Published recordings appear on the website with a "Field Recording" label, so listeners know they are hearing a take recorded straight off a phone's microphone.
More about what else the app can do: The wikiloops app.
Get notified about likes and comments
Once your recording is out there, you will want to know when people like it or comment on it. For that, push notifications have to be switched on in the app: open the "You" tab, tap the settings icon and choose "Notifications".
help article was written by Richard Kaiser on and last edited on
If someone had told me that one day I played with musicians from all over the world I would have taken for a madman. Today this is real! Thanks Dick