Yay! One more thing to distract me from doing things that matter! So I was sitting in class trying to take notes while recording with Quicktime Pro and I realized there should be an app that does both! And then I thought of all the cool things that you could do with both audio and text information. What if the app associated each character you typed to a point in the audio? That way, you could annotate audio. Now the really cool stuff happens when you display this data. What if you could scrub through the audio by selecting different parts of the text? What about jumping to a point in the text by jumping to a point in the audio? How about a view where text is shown next to where in the audio it was spoken? I decided this could be a really cool app…and it isn’t like it is going to write itself! Seriously though, I can really see this as rounding out my shareware app offering for Positron. SearchEngineer (tentative new name) and Audipad!
P.S. Patent pending. Patent pending. Patent pending.
P.P.S. Hilariousness
Funny I had an idea to make a similar piece of software when I was in class too. It would improve recording lectures enourmously. My thought was to have more of a single interface between note taking and audio – you can see the audio going and you have a text input field that ‘tags’ the audio at its current place. You could then save this file in the bookmarked format often used for podcasts, etc. To some extent, GarageBand ’06 had implemented this, but its definitely not designed for note taking and isn’t the optimal way to do it. Never got arround to making it though – to busy with school. Now that I’m out of school, I’d consider coding it with you – for 50% of the profits, that is =).
“Necessity is the mother of invention”
Good luck on that app, if you need help, I’m all yours. Thanks for giving my icons a fine home 
Yeah, it’s an appealing idea to record while taking notes, and get the best of both worlds — super annotation! : )
…even basic recording is handy; OmniOutliner Pro has a good implementation, but in terms of the specific functions you describe, have you seen Word’s Notebook view?
It’s pretty good actually, and does basically what you describe, tho that’s hardly any reason to stop working on a tight, task-specific, app — make yours better! ; )
FWIW another really useful option would be a simple recording app that allowed you to directly drag the resulting audio file into another app from the recording app, rather than requiring you to deal with saving the file, navigating to it in the Finder, and then dragging to the receiving app.
…more general purpose than your suggestion, of course, but therefore also applicable to working with other apps? e.g. add audio annotation to non-MS word processors, the dozens of info managers out there, etc. How about as a companion product to your note-taker? You’ll be a SW tycoon in no time. ; )
BTW – You can almost achieve this with QT Pro and TextEdit; QTP auto-saves the recording to the desktop, then you can drag the title bar proxy icon into the document, and copy the recording, rather than inserting an alias.
Then you just have to clean up the recording files on the desktop… like I said almost there. : )
maybe you could check this news on this blog :
http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2005/10/on_the_bbc_annotatable_audio_project.shtml
best regards