Move voice memos to a Mac

Memos become even more useful when not marooned on your iPhone

Memos become even more useful when not marooned on your iPhone

The Voice Memos app is one of the unsung heroes of iOS. It’s incredibly useful for making notes while you’re out and about without having to tap them into the Notes app. It is also the go-to app if you want to make an audio recording of a meeting.

Once you’ve made a recording, it’s stored in the app and can be played back, edited or deleted. But what if you want to use it somewhere else? Say, on your Mac for example. You’ll need to get the memo off your iPhone.

There are a number of options for achieving this, including syncing with iTunes. Many of us, however, prefer to use iTunes as infrequently as possible, or avoid it altogether if we can. Thankfully, there are several alternative routes to moving your memos to a Mac, although some of them require you to be running iOS 8 on your iPhone and OS X Yosemite on your Mac.

Voice memos are saved as MPEG-4 audio files with a .m4a file extension. They’ll play in any application that supports the format, which means most apps that support audio playback, including QuickTime Player. So you can edit the audio file in Audacity, say, or import it to Evernote and play it back from there. If you double-click the file on your Mac, though, it will be imported to iTunes and played back from there. So if you don’t want it in iTunes, don’t double-click it. (Alternatively, if you never want to import .m4a audio files into iTunes by double-clicking on them, select a file of that type in Finder, choose File > Get Info, expand the Open With section of the window that opens, choose your preferred app and then click the Change All button.)

If you’re running older versions of the operating systems, fear not. There are still non-iTunes options available, they’re just not as elegant. Outlined below are three separate methods for extracting voice memos from your iPhone and putting them somewhere more useful instead. Kenny Hemphill