The new Voice Memos app on the iPhone 3.0 software is pretty cool. It makes great sounding recordings, and it’s easy as pie to use. The only glitch I’ve run into is that you can’t get the recordings off if they are over 2 minutes. Now what?
There are two three methods. One is easy, one is for the geeks, and the third is an in between one.
Method 1: iTunes [easy]
When you plug your iPhone into iTunes, go to the Music tab and make sure that there is a check mark next to “Include voice memos”. This will automatically sync your voice memos into their own playlist in iTunes where you can then do whatever you’d like with them. Here’s a screenshot of where to look in iTunes.
Method 2: SSH for Jailbroken iPhones [geeky]
If you have your iPhone jailbroken, you can SSH into it and pull the recordings off manually. They’ll play just fine in iTunes or QuickTime and then you can convert them to another format if you want.
In your SFTP program (I use Cyberduck, it’s free), go to this path to find the recordings:
/private/var/mobile/Media/Recordings
Method 3: iPhone Explorer [in between]
I’ve had a lot of questions about this, so I’m adding it to the post. If the previous methods didn’t work, this one is also pretty easy, although it requires installing iPhone Explorer. It’s free software for Mac and PC and your phone doesn’t need to be jailbroken. Here’s a step-by-step for using iPhone Explorer:
- Download and install iPhone Explorer.
- Connect your iPhone via USB cable to your comptuer and open iPhone Explorer.
- Click the arrow next to your iPhone’s name, and then navigate to:
/Media/Recordings/ - Locate the voice memo you’d like to download. They will be named with the date they were created, such as:
20110210 114619.m4a - Once you see it, you can drag it to your Desktop or any other folder on your computer
what do yhu mean about check mark because when i went to music all i saw was the music i had on my ipod thats all
@Jasmine, You need to click on the “Music” tab on the top of the window, not on the left column. Check this image.
Worked like a charm. Now, how do I move it out of iTunes? I can’t seem to copy it or email it.
Thanks!
@Roger, Usually iTunes will let you grab the track, and drag it right onto your desktop. If not, then you can always right-click and choose “Show in Finder” or “Show in Windows Explorer.” Just remember that if you move the file that it shows you, it’ll get lost from iTunes. You’re better off copying that file to wherever you want to use it.
Hi Casey,
I have the iphone 4 and I cannot believe how difficult it is to get large voice memos off the phone! I have followed your method 1 but I have the same problem as Roger – how do I get them from my phone onto my computer? If I right click on the file/s I want to move I don’t get “Show in Finder” or “Show in Windows Explorer.” I get ‘show in playlist.’ Isn’t there a way to export them as mp3 or mp4?
@Jess, if you followed method 1, then the memos are already on your computer. I’m not sure why you’re not seeing the options “Show in Finder” when you right-click on the memo. Try dragging that file from iTunes onto your Desktop and that might get the file for you, although, it’ll be in AAC format, not MP3.
I have a couple memos that are a little over 30 minutes long… but now matter how many times I try, I cannot get one on that is 56 minutes long. Is this just too long to copy over?
I have done all of that. It only exports the two smallest files in my Memo folder. i have about 15 voice Memos all but two over 2 mins. and only those 2 import into my itunes. can someone please tell me what i am doing wrong.
@Ethan & @Joe, I don’t have any memos that long, so I can’t tell you why it’s not working. I’ll test it out myself and report back to you what happens.
Keep in mind that if you are jailbroken you can pull them directly off the iPhone pretty easily.
Thank u!!!
I tested method 1 with an hour-long recording and it worked fine.
iphone4 method 1 combined with the drag and drop to my desktop worked like a charm. thank god for people like you : )
Hi Casey!
I downloaded cyberduck but now I’m lost not too sure what to do with it, any help would be appreciated to get a voicememo off my phone 3GS
I tried to go to file-open connection-typed in the location you described above /private… and the default button is highlighted ‘mirror.switch…’ so i’m pretty sure i don’t have a clue what i’m doing, if you can help walk me through it, that would be awesome! Thanks so much for your help, I appreciate ya!
Julia
@Julia, Have you tried the first method I described using iTunes? If that doesn’t work then we can start troubleshooting Cyberduck. Let me know!
got it! Thanks, itunes worked like a charm ~ just tried to figure another way to do it.
@Julia, if you really wanna get in and browse the file system of your phone via your USB connection, you can also use iPhone Explorer. However, it won’t let you access all of your phone’s file system unless it’s jailbroken. It’s way easier than the Cyberduck route. Let me know if you have any more questions.
This method worked best for me, I had a 2.5Hour recording, and I couldn’t get it off any other way. Thanks so much ^_^
Hi Casey
Can you tell me how to get large voice memos off my unlocked and jailbroken 3Gs without using iTunes? Can I do it with iphone explorer? Can I save my contacts, too, with iphone explorer? Thanks.
@Lorna, Yes, you can use iPhone Explorer to get your voice memos off. Just navigate to /private/var/mobile/Media/Recordings and you’ll be able to save them. I haven’t had any experience with saving contacts with iPhone Explorer, but that’s because I sync my contacts with Google so they are always backed up. Perhaps consider using Gmail and Google Sync. I’ve been very pleased with it. If not, then you have the option to sync your contacts with Yahoo! address book. Hope that helps!
Hi, I have. Voice memo on my phone but I can only listen to 30 seconds of it. When I try to take it off using method one, it still only let’s me listen to 30 seconds still but yet it’s showing it’s 15 minutes long (as it should be)
@Lisa, I’m not sure why that would be happening, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with how you’re getting the memo off your phone since it doesn’t work when it’s still on your phone. Off the top of my head, I would guess that maybe the mic got covered after 30 seconds so it just recorded silence for the remaining 15 minutes. Do you remember doing anything with your phone while you were making the recording? Plugging in headphones, opening a different app, locking, putting it in your pocket, etc.?
It’s super easy. I don’t know why people have trouble. Use his method 1 above, then go to iTunes playlist labeled “Voice Memos”. Find your long memo there – I had one an hour and ten minutes that was a consult with a neurosurgeon – and just right click on it. The list that pops up has “copy” as one of the choices. Select copy and then go to whereever on you computer you want to put it. I made a directory called Voice Memos. Again, right click on an empty area and select paste; voila, it’s there. It’ll be in MP4 format. Then you can have your way with it, rename it, convert it to another format, edit it, whatever. – BLJ
i don’t want to replace my whole music library just to pull one voice memo out… is there a solution to this?
@Thomas, You shouldn’t have to replace your whole library to get voice memos off unless you are trying to use a different PC than the one you originally synced your phone and music with. If you no longer have access to that PC, then I recommend a jailbreak and extraction via method #2. Let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Hey Casey, I recorded a 30minure interview. It won’t play on the iphone (3), it’s too long to send via mms or mail, and when I tick the ‘include voice memos’ box in the sync it syncs a 1minute recording but not the long one…any ideas? I have no experience at all with the jailbreak stuff- do you think it would work in this case? Cheers man
@Joel, Hmm, that sounds like the recording may have been corrupted. If I’m understanding you correctly, you can see the memo listed on your iPhone, but when you try to play it, it does nothing. If that’s the case, see if you can trim the memo a little bit and try to play it. Maybe trimming a little off the beginning or end will make it re-save the file correctly. If that doesn’t work, you might want to start learning how to jailbreak so that you can pull the file off manually, then use other desktop software to resurrect the file. Let me know how it goes.
Salud,
casey
I checked the box but cannot find the recording on any playlist. Was the sync supposed to create anew playlist for the Voice Messages? or is that something I need to create myself? if you can give me some additional detailed steps to try and find the voice recording I would really appreciate the help for a low techie like myself.
Thanks
@Scott, Yes, the sync should have created a playlist automatically called “Voice Memos.” There aren’t any other steps for me to run through, so I’m not sure why it’s not working. If I could make a guess, maybe your iTunes window is rather small right now, so not all the playlists on the left side are showing. “Voice Memos” would be on the bottom, most likely, so maybe it’s obscured by the height of your window. See if you can make the window bigger, or scroll down to the bottom of all your playlists. If that’s not it, then try running the sync again. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what else to tell you. :-/ Good luck!
Hi Casey, I have an iPhone 4. I was able to transfer 6 significantly long lecture memos (45 min +) from my iPhone to iTunes and since then I have continued to record lectures. However, for some reason I can’t find the new lectures in my iTunes Voice Memos. What’s the problem here? I feel like it should be working but I can’t find them through Finder or in iTunes.
@Josh, I know it sounds stupid, but let’s start with the most obvious question: are you re-syncing your phone with iTunes to get the new memos in there? Ok, that’s outta the way, now let’s see if we can figure this out. Is it possible that the check mark next to “Include voice memos” got unchecked accidentally? Is it possible that the name of the playlist “Voice Memos” got changed and now a new playlist was added? Have you tried searching your iTunes music library (not the playlist) for the memos in case they aren’t getting added to the playlist for some reason? Those are about the only reasons I can think of at the moment. Let me know how it goes.
You Rock! It worked!
Yes! Glad it worked for you, Sheila.
Hi Casey,
I have an unjailbroken Iphone 3GS and I’ve tried method one . . .and tried, and tried. The only memo that appears in my iTunes library is one that was emailed to me — not any of the ones that I’ve created myself. There’s no “memo” playlist in my iTunes library. I’ve tried messaging the memo i need to myself, but I can’t email it to myself to replicate the system that seems to have worked for the one I can find in my library because it’s too big — otherwise I wouldn’t even have this problem.
I’m an art student and need this recording soon for a performance! Please help.
Hi Marina,
I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble getting your voice memo off of your iPhone. Have you double-checked to make sure you have the box checked in iTunes that says “Include voice memos”? The other thing to consider is if you’ve already synced the voice memos with iTunes and then deleted them, it won’t transfer them again.
The other method you can try is using iPhone Explorer to get to them. It’s free software for Mac and PC and your phone doesn’t need to be jailbroken. Here’s a step-by-step for using iPhone Explorer:
Media/Recordings/20110210 114619.m4aHope that helps!
Hi. I would love some help on this. I haven’t had any trouble getting the voice memo’s onto my laptop. The problem I have now is that the files were accidentally dragged and dropped into a dropbox folder. So now they are listed in the iTunes folder on my computer just as a file, not a .m4a. The original recordings are still on my iPhone 4, but when I sync the phone it will only copy new recordings into the Voice Memos playlist. I can’t work out how to get the 3 files that got moved by accident from the phone to iTunes again. I’ve tried syncing it a few times. By the way I cant seem to get the files back from the dropbox folder either.
@Yolande, I’m not sure what’s going on with your Dropbox folder. It should behave just like any other folder on your system and allow you to move files out of it. When you say that they are listed as “just a file,” do you mean they don’t have the extension .m4a on the end? If that’s the case, then just add it, click the dialog box that asks if you’re sure you want to make the change, and then they should work again. If that doesn’t work, try the newly added method 3 above using iPhone Explorer to get the original recordings off your iPhone again. Let me know if it works out!
Thanks Casey. You’re a star! I still don’t know what is going on with Dropbox, but both changing the extension (silly me!) and also using iExplorer have worked perfectly. I really appreciate your help.
hi,
thank you 
i can’t drag the files out of iexplorer and i don’t get a voice memos playlist through itunes. i have an iphone 4s and i have windows 7 if it helps
sorry just tried it again and it worked
Thank you very much, you helped me a lot
Thanks! This was a great help.
Thanks! I was looking for the path to the recordings.
I have a concert I recorded in voice memo last night. It’s 67min long and itunes only shows the small 37 second recording. I don’t want to jailbreak my phone again. But I cant get iExplorer to open so I guess it’s my only option.
@Dave, I can try to help you if you post the steps you’ve taken and where you run into snags. Try to start from the beginning again with iTunes. Plug in your iPhone, check the box to transfer the voice memos, and then sync. Post the results here so I can help you troubleshoot it.
Also, when you say iExplorer won’t open, do you mean the program fails to start, or that it won’t recognize your iPhone, or that it can’t save the recordings, or something else? The more details you give, the faster and easier it is to get help.
I got it to open & I moved to my desktop from iExplorer. But it’s an m4a file and I’ve downloaded 4 dif conversion progs and they all say error when I try to convert it to mp3. Says it could be copy protected? All I want to do is to be able to burn the concert to a cd.
@Dave, Excellent! Glad you were able to get it on your Desktop. The .m4a file will go directly into an iTunes playlist, and then you can burn a CD directly from there without needing to convert it to .mp3. If you’re interested in reading more about the .m4a extension, check out Wikipedia’s write-up.
It doesn’t go into itunes tho. I can only drag and drop it into the voice memo playlist and everytime i do that. It’s not there. Even when I right click and open with itunes, it’s still not there.
@Dave, Hmm… That’s happened to me before where iTunes doesn’t want to add the file, but it’s been because it’s protected. Your voice memos aren’t protected, so it shouldn’t be doing that. Another time it wouldn’t let me add because I changed the extension to .aac and it wasn’t an AAC file.
First, try changing the extension to .mp4 and then add it to a playlist in iTunes. If that works, you should be able to burn a CD with it in that format since the .m4a format is just a specific identifier of the .mp4 container anyway.
If that doesn’t work, then use media.io to convert the .m4a into an .mp3 and then see if iTunes will allow you to add it then.
I’m curious to see what happens, so please post your results!
Still nothing. When I try to convert it at that site it says
Sorry, 20120105 225858.m4a could not be converted.
Unfortunately, media.io doesn’t support the format of 20120105 225858.m4a.
So, I deleted the original and moved it from the phone to my desktop again and a pop up said it may be corrupt. It did not say this the first time around. Also, the file shows on my phone 67:38 but it will not play back on my phone. The smaller 2:00 memo plays from the phone and itunes. This has me completely frustrated. I’m not new to auido or video files and have never had any issues with either until I got an iphone and trying to get those files from my phone to my pc.
I certainly appreciate you taking the time to help.
@Dave, Oh no! Well, I didn’t want to say it before because it’s usually a cop-out, but it sounds like the file is corrupted.
I’ve heard some people having success with corrupted files by opening it with Audacity or Songbird (both free). If you can open it with Audacity to see the waveform, you can export at least part of it to an .mp3 that works. If neither of those can open it, then you might just be out of luck.
Well I got the file to at least show up in Songbird, but it doesn’t show any info on it and again says may be corrupt. Looks like I’m just s.o.l.
Anyway, thanks for all your help and your time.
does this also work with the ipod touch 4th gen?
@Sean, I haven’t tested it myself with the iPod Touch, but there’s no reason why method 1 shouldn’t work. It’s the same iOS. Give it a shot and let us know if it works.