Do You Need an Audio Interface to Record on Your iPhone?

You do not need an interface to record with the phone's built-in mic, and you do not need one to record hardware that already does its own USB audio, like a lot of modern grooveboxes and synths. In those cases you just plug in and record.

You do need an interface when you want to record an external microphone, an electric guitar or bass, or a line-level source like a synth or mixer that does not do USB audio itself. The interface is the bridge that turns those into something a phone can record cleanly.

The built-in mic is genuinely useful. For catching ideas, recording your voice, an acoustic guitar or a room, it is ready the moment you open a recording app, with nothing to plug in. It will not match a proper microphone, but for capture and sketching it is more than enough.

The other no-interface case surprises people. Plenty of hardware already streams class-compliant USB audio on its own, so it plugs straight into the phone with a single cable and no interface in between. Roland's SP-404 MK2, the Teenage Engineering EP-133, and Elektron's Digitakt, Digitone and Syntakt all do this. For those, the instrument is the interface. We have separate guides for each of those.

Reach for an interface when the source cannot get itself into the phone as clean digital audio. That means a real microphone, especially a condenser mic that needs phantom power, an electric guitar or bass that needs a proper instrument input, or a synth, drum machine or mixer that only has analog outputs.

It is also the answer when you simply want better sound than the built-in mic. A decent interface with a good mic is the single biggest jump in recording quality you can make on a phone, far more than any setting in an app.

If you buy an interface for a phone, the one box to tick is that it is class-compliant. That means it needs no special drivers and works with an iPhone or iPad out of the box, the same way it would plug into a computer. Most modern USB interfaces from the known brands are class-compliant, but it is worth confirming before you buy.

A class-compliant interface plus the right cable is all it takes, with no driver to install and no companion app to configure.

On a USB-C iPhone, an iPhone 15 or later, a class-compliant interface connects with a single USB-C cable. Recent versions of iOS fully support class-compliant USB audio this way, so it just works. Using the interface maker's own cable, or Apple's, avoids the odd connection issue.

On a Lightning iPhone, an iPhone 14 or earlier, you need an Apple camera adapter in between. The Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter is the one to get, because its extra power port lets you power the interface and charge the phone at once. Small bus-powered interfaces often run fine straight off the phone, but a hungrier one may need that powered adapter or a powered hub.

Any class-compliant interface with the inputs you need works. For most people a simple two-input model from Focusrite, MOTU, Audient or similar is plenty, giving you a mic input with phantom power and an instrument input. If you want the full rundown of what works well with a phone, we have a dedicated guide to that.

Reel records both ways, so you are covered whichever side of this you land on. Use the built-in mic with nothing attached, or plug in any class-compliant interface or instrument and Reel detects it and records it, with no drivers and no setup, in clean 32-bit float. I built it so that adding an interface is a step up in quality, never a step up in hassle.

A short walkthrough of how Reel records.