Marvelist can now record voice notes. On iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and in the browser.
Tap the microphone in any notes list, speak, and the recording saves right there next to your written notes, not off in a separate voice memos section. It syncs across whichever devices you're signed into, plays back inline, and you can scrub through it, skip ahead, or speed it up.
That's version 2.12.0, and it's the headline feature. What follows is the honest version of what shipped, including the part I very nearly got wrong.
Where it actually works
Recording works on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and in supported browsers on the web. That last qualifier matters: Marvelist only records into a format Apple's own devices can play back, AAC packed into MP4. Safari produces that. Some other browsers still can't, and there Marvelist tells you recording isn't available rather than saving you a file your phone will refuse to open later.
Playback works everywhere, including web recordings, once they exist.
The bit I nearly shipped broken
Voice notes made on Apple Watch were, until quite late in this build, the one gap in the story. You could record on your wrist, but getting a transcript out of it meant opening the note on your phone afterward and asking for one yourself, same as if you'd never touched the Watch at all.
That's fixed. Watch recordings are now transcribed automatically, same as any other recording. The transcription itself still doesn't happen on the Watch though, it happens on your iPhone, shortly after your phone picks the recording up. There's no live transcription anywhere in Marvelist. Nothing transcribes as you speak, on any device.
What's free, what's Premium
Everyone can record. That's not a Premium feature and it never was going to be.
Free accounts can keep up to 10 recordings, each up to 3 minutes long. Fine for catching a thought on the way out the door. Premium removes both ceilings: recordings can run up to 2 hours, and there's no limit on how many you keep.
Premium also adds transcription. Every recording gets transcribed automatically and entirely on your own device, and that transcript becomes the note's text, so a recording you made turns up later when you search for something you said in it, not just something you typed. If your Premium lapses, nothing already recorded disappears. You just can't add new ones until you're back under the free limit.
One honest caveat on transcription: the automatic run deliberately never asks you for microphone or speech permission out of the blue. If you've never granted that access, your first transcript is the one you ask for by hand. Every automatic run after that works quietly in the background.
What voice notes aren't
They're not a new kind of list, and there isn't a separate place they live. The Voice Notes tile in the app is a view across the notes lists you already have, not a folder recordings get filed into. And they're not end to end encrypted. Transcription happens on your device and nothing leaves it to make that happen, but the recording itself is uploaded to Marvelist's storage in the EU so it can sync between your devices and play back on the web. If you keep anything in a Vault list, voice notes can't join it there yet.
Also in 2.12.0
Two small fixes that had been annoying me for a while. The floating toolbar at the bottom of a long note no longer sits on top of the last few lines. And you can now apply a heading, a bullet, or a numbered list to an empty line before you type anything into it, rather than having to write the line first and reformat it after.
Update and give it a try. Let me know what breaks.
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