SoundPrint, Find A Quiet Place 4+

The creators of Soundprint have performed a huge public service — making dining out bearable. It may be the best restaurant-related app I have ever downloaded. I have others that help with reviews, reservations or takeout, but this is the first one to reliably tell me whether I am going to be able to have a civilized conversation over dinner.

It enables you to spend your dining dollars wisely and not waste them on an expensive, cacophonous ordeal.

It shows whether a restaurant will be quiet, moderately noisy, loud or very loud and has a “Quiet List” of the best places. I am weary of going out for what is supposed to be a pleasant meal but which ends up being an assault on the ear drums. These experiences leave me with laryngitis and a feeling of disappointment in humanity for putting up with such restaurants. With this app, it won’t happen again.

It also allows users to use their phones to measure decibel levels at a venue, rate the ease of conversation, and submit this data.

I’m hoping as many people as possible will sign up and submit noise ratings so I will know where to dine and so that the civilized restaurants in my area will enjoy more patronage.

Brilliant. I really hope it catches on and spreads wildly. I just found out about it, downloaded it, and already I love it. Restaurant noise levels are ludicrous. I'm one of those folks who already has an excellent noise level app (by Digital Six), but there's no crowdsourcing there. Now there is! A few months ago I met a friend at a restaurant/bar with good Yelp reviews in Midtown (NYC) for dinner where the noise level was over 90 dB! Borderline permanent hearing damage! We left. But there was no way to report this to others, apart from typing a note in Yelp that no one would ever get around to actually reading. I love this app.

The idea behind this app is an excellent one, and desperately needed. But it doesn’t measure accurately. Either it’s programmed to ignore human voice frequencies, or smartphone microphones can’t do the job. SoundPrint consistently “measured” a man yelling at the top of his lungs into a loudspeaker as quieter than an air conditioner. It repeatedly told me that the inaudible click of my home button was TWICE as loud as the man yelling into the loudspeaker! It’s clearly drastically off and miscalibrated, to the point of uselessness. The submissions also only record average decibels, not the maximum. This can help if it recorded you sniffling or sneezing at 90 dB, but it makes records of loud but intermittent noise totally useless. The restaurant ratings are a perfect example: “quiet “ restaurants are still way too loud for anyone with a sensitivity disability, which are the people who need this app the most. I don’t expect miracles from a free app, but I expect SOME functionality.