I'm not going to go into a rant about Apple or iPhone or anything because this is a little serious.

My wife recorded her aunt telling stories about her youth in Iran last Thursday when she was lying in her hospital bed. This morning she passed away and my wife has tasked me with getting the voice memo off her phone because she can't listen to it yet.

The problem is it just isn't working the way it should. I've synced the phone several times. I've deleted the voice memos playlist, restarted iTunes, reconnected the phone, and synced, but got nothing. I've unchecked and re-checked the "Include voice memos" checkbox in the "Music" tab, but that hasn't done anything. This is very frustrating and I'm hoping someone here will be able to help me with it.

This is with an iPhone 4S, and iTunes running on a Windows 7 machine. We've tried sending the memo as an email attachment, but her phone didn't want to send it because the file was too big.

Thanks for your help.

Oh for crying out...

So I found some advice somewhere online to trim the voice memos on the iPhone, and that would get iTunes to recognize them as something to sync. Besides this being ridiculous, I wasn't keen on deleting even a second of such an important recording. Besides, the recording in question was 45 minutes long, and the trimming could only be done on the iPhone its self, and it was physically impossible to specify something as small as one second to trim from the beginning or end.

So what I did was to not select anything to be trimmed, and hit the Trim button anyway. So I was left with the same length recording, but that seemed to be enough to get iTunes to get a clue and see the damn recording.

So what's the problem? Now I have the opposite problem: it syncs the voice memo every time I've synced the phone four times now, so I have four copies of the same voice memo in there.

Now what do I do?

First you'll get no argument form me. With few exceptions, such as the OS, Apple's software largely sucks. It sucks less than most others, but still sucks. Ok we got that out of the way.

I'm not sure what the issue is/was, but I understood from the first message the following:

1. You wanted to retrieve the recording and place a copy on your computer
2. You wanted to delete the original from the iPhone


That should normally be straight forward. When I last used this feature the memos would appear under the iPhone in the source list on the left column every time I connected the phone to iTunes. Simply drag the memo to the desktop or into another playlist in iTunes.

I don't know if it was the case previously but now I notice that voice memos are listed under the music tab for syncing. I don't do any kind of automatic sync for music and never have, so in the reverse process from putting music onto the phone, I used to drag voice memos from the phone into iTunes.

HOWEVER...

Currently running the latest iOS 5.x voice memos are not appearing when I connect my iPhone to iTunes wirelessly. This seems to match what you were seeing. In fact I have 3 memos recorded over the past 2 years and I still don't see anything in iTunes about them. I do have a copy of the oldest one from back when this used to work and I copied it manually from the phone.

IMO, this is a bug. Surprise surprise. Ok, it could also be a (stupid) design decision (but I doubt it). There's also no way to pull photos and videos from an iPhone in iTunes. You have to use another program for that.

Solution: Use third-party software to retrieve the files - there are a half dozen or more iPhone file browsers available that should do the job. Then delete the memos from the Voice Memo app directly.

Close, but what I wanted should have been even more straightforward. All I wanted was for iTunes to behave normally and sync the voice memos the way it's supposed to: which is to place a copy in iTunes. I didn't necessarily want to delete it off the iPhone after that.


I had tried dragging the memo from the iPhone into the voice memos playlist. I tried dragging it into the library. I tried dragging it anywhere, and nothing reacted. That was even more frustrating. It wasn't working automatically, and I had no manual recourse for it.


You might be on to the cause of the problem here, as my wife had switched over to wireless syncing when she got her 4S. We never knew the voice memo syncing was a problem because she'd never made one before.


Yeah, that seemed to be the direction I was headed towards. Clearly I hate to do that when it certainly looks like it should be work better than this. As it is, it looks like I have no choice but to delete it from the phone because it won't stop creating a new copy on the computer. I'll make sure the file is backed up then delete it from Apple's software's grasp.

Thanks for the assistance.