Voice memo won't play

Hello,

I also experienced being unable to playback a long iPhone voice memo.

After having read all these posts, I tried to retrieve my unplayable voice memo with various software.

I tried Phoneview, which recognized my .m3a voice memo and enabled me to copy it unto my mac, but there it was unplayable by iTunes, or VLC, or Quicktime.

I downloaded and tried iExplorer, but that didn't even detect the voice memo on my iPhone.

I tried iBrowse, to no avail, no voice memo detected on my iPhone.

Then I remembered my old MobileSyncBrowser, which is a utility that discloses contents from iTunes Backups of your iPhone.(http://mobilesyncbrowser.com)

(Very useful if for instance you lose your iphone, you can still retrieve content that's not shown in iTunes, like call log and messages from your last backup).

So first I backed up my iPhone in iTunes.

Then I launched Mobile Sync Browser, chose from the list my last backup of my iPhone, browsed to

Photos and other files>Media Domain>Media>Recordings,

and there I saw my voice memo displayed in two versions, one .m4a, and the other .mov.

I exported the .mov version to my computer, and was able to read it using QuickTime.

(iPhone is an old 3G, voice memo was 1hour 26 minutes long, computer is a MacBook Air.)

Hope this helps, good luck!

I used iFunBox. However, I had to navigate to the "Fragments" subfolder, where I located the underlying audio (m4a) files. Following is a sample path:

iPhone 5s > Voice Memos > Media > Recordings > 20150408 161758.composition > fragments

Apple seems to have resolved for new recordings because there is nothing in the "Fragments" subfolder related to today's sample recording. However, there were indeed files in the older recordings' "Fragments" subfolder, which were the only playable files. I hope that this helps someone.

I play a lot of guitar and compose pieces eventually,but it all starts with the voice recorder on my iPhone 6 to get the riffs down on 'paper' so to speak. Well iPhone took a dump, so I decided to reset it. Before doing so, not only did I back up the entire phone with iTunes backup, I also transferred all my photos and voice memos to Google Drive, and a local hard drive.

I had the same urge to smash as the rest of you when I realized that an m4a file will not play anywhere other than the iPhone it was recorded and KEPT on, because it will not recover from the iTunes backup. VERY long story short, the only thing that worked is this:

iPHONE:

Unplug your iPhone.

Open the Google Drive app

Go to the folder with the m4a files

Notice the different file icon. These are the m4a that will play on Google Drive. Just double click on it and it plays.

The end.

I've emailed the same file to my gmail,but gmail will not play. Cannot import into iTunes. iPhone has no clue it even had voice memos. Google Drive and its web-based codec appears to be the only solution.

FML,

Eren

It seems absolutely unbelievable that a company that once had a reputation for reliability has fallen this far with their latest telephone. I've lost recorded data as well. One thing is I might be able to recover it, losing HOURS (so far) of my time trying in the process. Another thing is that given these circumstances the app is absolutely worthless and I'd strongly advise everyone not to use it all.

Do you have instructions on how to use the app? I can't seem to move the corrupted memo into it?