Sometimes, it can be hard to keep up with everything that’s being said in a meeting, lecture or any other situation where you need to take notes. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! You can easily record the audio around you and use it to fill in the gaps or enhance your own notes. Plus, you can watch your notes come alive as you play back the recording!

Create and replay a recording

You can record audio as often as you like and each time you start and stop a recording, an audio clip is created.

Start a recording

• Tap the Microphone icon on the nav bar to switch to the Recording Mode. A duration timer will appear, indicating the recording is in progress, and any notes you then take in the document will also be recorded! If you switch away from the app, audio recording still continues in the background, indicated by a flashing orange Mic icon on the device status bar.

  

  The Microphone icon

  

  The flashing Mic icon means continuous background recording when the app is not visible.

<aside> 💡 You can tap the orange Mic icon on the status bar to switch back to Goodnotes.

</aside>

Stop a recording

• Tap the Stop Recording icon, i.e. the running timer.

Play back a recording

1. Tap the Playback icon on the nav bar and tap the Play icon.

   

   The Playback icon. The red dot indicates there’s a new audio clip.

2. Tap the Play icon.

   

   The playback controls

   <aside> ℹ️ The playback controls

   • Close: Closes the recording player.
   • Play: Plays/Resumes the playback. Any notes previously taken during the recording will be played back as well. Once tapped, it’s changed to a Pause ⏸️ icon that can be used to pause the playback.
   • Seek bar: Allows swiping along it to play back a certain point in time.
   • Separator: Marks the beginning of a new audio clip.
   • Rewind: Rewinds the playback 10 seconds.
   • Browse: Shows all recorded audio clips in the document.
   • Fast-forward: Fast forward the playback 10 seconds. </aside>

   <aside> 💡 To hear the recording more clearly, you can tap the Browse icon and enable Noise Reduction to reduce the recorded background noise during playback.

   This feature is currently available only on A16 / M1 devices or later:

   • iPad Pro (11-inch, 3rd generation) (2021)
   • iPad Pro (12.9-inch, 5th generation) (2021)
   • iPad Air (5th generation) (2022)
   • iPad Pro (11-inch, 6th generation) (2022)
   • iPad Pro (12.9-inch, 6th generation) (2022)
   • iPhone 14 Pro / Max </aside>

Jump to a specific position of the recording

• Tap Browse and tap an audio clip.

  

Play back some notes linked to the recording

1. Circle those notes with the Lasso Tool, or simply long-press any part of them.

2. Choose Play Recording. The playback jumps to when those notes were taken.

   

   <aside> ℹ️ Only notes taken on the page where the recording started are captured. This means if you start a recording in a document, then switch to a different document to take notes, they won’t be replayed when the recording is played back.

   

   The orange Stop Recording icon on a document tab title indicates where the recording started. During this session, notes taken in any other document are not captured.

   </aside>

Configure playback

1. Tap the Browse icon.