I’m also a fan of the Apple-supplied free app Voice Memos. Simple, straightforward, and easily started and ignored during a meeting, some impromptu karaoke, a birthday party or a stealth espionage rendezvous. Ah, well, maybe not so much that last one, now that I think about it!
What’s confusing about Voice Memos, however, is that the actual recordings seem to only live within the app and can’t be found with the iPhone’s otherwise quite capable Music (iTunes) app.
So when you plug your iPhone 4s into your computer, are these voice memos actually accessible files, or are they forever hidden within the Voice Memos app?
Turns out that they are accessible once your iPhone shows up in iTunes.
Plug in your phone, then when it shows up on the left side of the iTunes window, click on the triangle adjacent to the device name and look closely at what’s listed:
It’s the last one that contains what we seek, “Voice Memos”. Click on it…
It’s not a glamorous display, but sure enough, here are the four voice memos I have on my own iPhone, organized by duration. Notice that for even the longest recording, over an hour, the file sizes are quite surprisingly small. One hour of audio and it’s under 30MB? Nice.
Here’s what’s also slick about iTunes: If you have it automatically syncing between your iPhone 4s and your computer, it’ll automatically copy all those audio memos onto your computer without you doing anything additional!
I have a genre “Voice Memo” created, with a graphic I pasted in myself, and after I’ve plugged in my phone, notice that it’s correctly identified that there are four voice memos:
A click and I realize the two new memos didn’t get the cute graphic and that they’re from a different phone (the earlier are from “iDave5.6”):
Want to share one with a colleague or friend? Simply drag and drop it from iTunes onto your Desktop and you’ll have a “.m4a” audio file that should be transport friendly and able to be enjoyed by them simply opening it in their own copy of iTunes or dragging and dropping onto their Web browser.
6 thoughts on “How do I copy voice memos off my iPhone 4s?”
Thank you Dave,
that helped me more than all those “software recommendations” which have been googlebombed on my screen. This little old phone is handy, just far too outdated and you said, sometimes its necessary to archive old conversations in a proper manner, – especially after all this stupid COVID teleconferences with remote-online-working and being so foolish using this 4s just as a recorder and could not import the recordings…, now my grandchild will be happy to ave a toy 😉
The problem that I have is that only one of twelve voice memos on my iPhone appear when i connect to my Macbook. And none of the other eleven can be seen or copied across?
Confused.
I agree with Rojack. I can’t drag these to a Windows 8 desktop, nor can I find the damn thing in the DCIM folder on the phone. So how am I supposed to use any large voice memo?
Thanks for this, and it’s all true except for the part at the end about dragging and dropping onto your desktop (so you can copy and share, or, in my case, send it to a transcriber). When I try to drag and drop from iTunes onto my PC desktop, it simply won’t do it. (There’s no copy option when I right-click either.) Any suggestions?
Voice Memo: can it be shared on Facebook?
If I delete a voice memo off my phone, does it remain in my iTunes account?
Thanks!
Hey Dave, great post. I paid for another voice recorder app [not voice memo which I did not realise was in my 4S already]. I could not email the files from my dictated meeting minutes, so a wasted 99 cents really.
Anyway, you have given me the solution and so elegant really.
Best wishes
Andrew