Voice memo won't play

This bug got me today - I had a 20 minute press conference go bad on me. Ipod Explorer worked perfectly for me. Thank you.

Apple - you need to fix this.

Same here for me. Just thought I lost an important recording. Luckily iPhone Explorer allowed me to recover the files: http://www.cygno.com/remco/20090813iPhone_Explorer_missing_voicememos.png

No mention of the memos in the Voice Memo application on the iPhone, nor the Voice Memo playlist in iTunes 8.2.1.

Hmmm... so far for my first two memo's recorded... 😟

Hi everyone.

I also have this problem on my iPhone 3G.

_*Behavior On iPhone:*_
1. Record a Voice Memo.
2. Attempt to play it back: play button changes to pause; timeline does not move; no audio whatsoever.

I should note that I had recorded and played back several Voice Memos before, and I had no problems. I just noticed that it no longer works correctly about a week ago, but I hadn't used it for about 3-4 weeks. I have several Memos that range from 3 seconds to 3 minutes in length, and the length doesn't seem to be a factor (although these are all very short clips anyway).

_*Workaround to play back clips on iPhone*_
+For me+, the following workaround works each and every time.
1. Record Memo.
Any attempt to play the clip at this point doesn't work (same behavior).
2. Hard reset the iPhone (power cycle by holding the power button).
3. Turn the iPhone back on, and any clips since the last power cycle now play flawlessly.

_*Behavior Synching:*_
When I noticed this issue last week, it was because I wanted to find and save some of my synched clips. That didn’t go so well, but I didn’t have time to look into it further at the time. I'll have to play with synching to see what behavior I'm running into, but I'll post what I find out, as well as any workarounds, once I do.

This is a workaround, and not a fix. It is a widely experienced bug, it is reproducible (and almost unavoidable) once it begins, and Apple does need to fix it. It is described in many articles on the net, so my guess is that Apple won't publicly acknowledge this, or say a word about it, until they fix it (as usual).

I hope this works for others until it's fixed.

Using the iPhone Explorer application definitely works. You can pull off the .mov file for the date of your voice memo and listen to it in quicktime. Also you can convert the .mov back to AAC format (m4a) using iTunes. I did this conversion to m4a and then deleted the corrupt m4a version of my voice memo on the iphone (leave the .mov version on the iPhone too). Then I renamed the .m4a file I created with iTunes to have the same prefix as the .mov version (date and time of the memo) and placed it back on the iphone in the same folder as the .mov (recordings). Now I can play the voice memo on the iPhone!

So after reading all the success of the Mac OS users, I've tracked down a possible solution for us Windows users.

Just use the same technique as describe above and I used Iphonebrowser which can be found in the download tab here:
http://code.google.com/p/iphonebrowser/wiki/Usage

I explored my iphone and found the .mov file in the "Recordings" folder.
Right click and chose "Save As" and put this somewhere on your PC.

Apple, Please fix this ASAP!



Follow the above suggestions. This worked for me.

Could this be an available free space issue? How much surplus capacity did you guys have?

Has anyone had this issue with tons of extra capacity (5x, 10x)?

I had about 400MB available before I recorded, and the .mov file size I am currently pulling down via iPhoneBrowser is 180MB. So, I had a problem with 2x extra.

I didn't see anyone mention how much room was left over, so I thought I would bring it up.

Having same problem... Apple does need to fix this!

Anyone know of other iPhone Applications - third party - that might record these long memos?

iTalk didn't work for me.

Same thing for me!

Another forum suggested trimming a couple seconds off the memo and re-synching. Didn't work for me, but another thing to try.

Apple really needs to fix this.

iPhone Explorer worked for me!

The file still won't play on my phone, but it playes in iTunes, and I copied the .mov file to a safe place in case it turns on me again.

Seriously, Apple. Your bad.

After struggling with same issue for a few days, restoring my iphone etc, I realized that this all began after I unsuccessfully tried to attach a voice memo to an SMS message and received a warning icon. Today I simply cleared the ichat message history on the phone with that person and voice memos works fine again. Must have been something to do with corrupted file or cache- good luck

First of all thanks to Richard for iPhone Explorer tip. I downloaded it and could see my missing voice file which, as he suggested, consisted of a 22mb .m4a file and a 260mb .mov file. Firstly, iPhone Explorer (0.964)refused to drag the files on to the Windows Vista desktop (and I tried the (0.972), it therefore DOES NOT work with Windows Vista. I then tried it on my Windows XP laptop and it worked, I was able to drag the files off on the the desktop. However, the files do not open and seem to be corrupt when using utility convertors.

However, in iPhone explorer is a preview facility. I changed the preferences to have a maximum preview size of 300 mb. By previewing the .mov file, iPhone explorer plays the whole 2 hour recording! It does this on Windows Vista and Windows XP. This means the file cannot be corrupt. The frustrating thing is I cannot move it from my iPhone, and I cannot playit with anything but iPhone Explorer preview!! Bizarre. I have now hit a brick wall with how to move this important sound recording to my PC.

Any Suggestions?

Andy

I post to support that Voice Memo has a buggy behaviour after I upgraded to 3.1.2.

My iPhone is iPhone 3G, no jailbreak (man) 16GB memory. I used to record for 3 to4 hours without any problems.

But not I have to take my other recording devices to my lectures.

Hope Apple fixes soon.

While playing the preview, the iPhone Explorer creates a temporary file on your hard drive in .../music/iPhoneExplorerTemp/

You can see the name of the temporary file it's creating on the upper right hand side during the preview.

When you exit the application, the file for the most recent preview is erased, but the other ones sit there.

So open the folder above so you can see what's happening, then play the file you want to save, then play something else, then exit the application. From there, you can drop and drag or copy that file to another location, rename it, and make sure it's secure.

Great tip Pirou - thank you!

I managed to save my important sound file to my Vista c: drive. It also plays perfectly. I am eternally grateful to you.

Come on Apple, fix this problem in the iPhone it makes the iphone much more useable if you can record long lectures and seminars.

Here is how I got around this problem. The memos are still on your iphone even if they do not appear to be. I downloaded the free app iphone explorer ( http://www.iphone-explorer.com/). It allows you to "see" the hidden voice memos. The voice memos that were visible all had the .m4a and weirdly enough, the ones that I could not "see" all, somehow, had a .mov on them. So I went into iphone explorer and changed the .mov to .m4a on each voice memo. It worked!!! I could play them again on the iphone explorer app. I am SO excited that my voice memos were found. Still the original problem of WHY the voice memos were given the .mov in the first place, but maybe Apple can look into this.
Hope this helps