Voice memo won't play

iPhone Explorer is the fix.

iPhone explorer does allow you to manually go into your phone and extract the voice memos you can't play through the iphone now, but, haha, that's not much of a fix.
That's quite similar to having to exit your car through the trunk.

Very annoying, this bug. Didn't notice it with 3.1.2, but I didn't use it much then. Tonight I woke up at 04:00 in the middle of the night with the idea for a song, recorded it (just to reassure you, this is not normal for me 😉. Today nothing is there. I will try with the iPhone Explorer, but my god, this is probably one of the easiest apps on the phone, and it doesn't work.

I agree! C'mon Apple, this should be fixed - soon. What good is a recorder that works "sometimes"?

Add me to the list. I just tried to playback a recording, and nothing. Exact same symptoms, slider bar says 0:00 -0:00. Okay iPhone Explorer is a way to get the recording off the iPhone, but I need to play back the voice memo on the iPhone. Come on Apple, it is taking to too long to fix a simple bug.

Andrew

Message was edited by: morkunas

Thanks so much! This really helped me get back an important interview!

I did have a issue however that I wanted to share in case anyone had the same problem.

I found and copied the file using iPhone Explorer to desktop but it sounded barely recognizable, apparently it was sped up really fast. It was a 29 min interview, that somehow got condensed to 5 mins. But what I did was put it in Premiere Pro and slowed the audio down to about 18% and it worked perfectly!

Everyone,

Thank you for all the great tips - but my problem persists.

I also lost a recording. An interview of around 68 minutes.

I used Iphone-explorer to find it, but only a 32mb m4a file is there. No .mov with a corresponding name.

Is the sound in the m4a file, or am I lost without the .mov?

thanks,

Dango

iPhone Explorer didn't work for me. There is no .mov file, just the .m4a that doesn't play anywhere. ANYWHERE.

The file is 20.6 MB in size but no program seems to be able to access that data.

Any advice? I'm desperate.

Same problem here. This is getting ridiculous, why doesn't Apple fix this? Even microsoft has better customer service.

Huck, I had the same problem and was getting desperate. I used iphone explorer to pull the files off the phone and they still wouldn't work. Then, just following Software Update's recommendations, I upgraded my version of Quicktime 7.6.4 - and I have QT Pro by the way. Magically, and quite unexpectedly, the truncated voice memos (the longest an hour and a half long) started playing on my Mac full length - even the ones that the 'get info' window said were only 12 seconds long - played to their full length. Using QT Pro, I then exported the files into AAC/M4A format to be safe. They then showed up in 'get info' as full length AND played properly. I think Apple realized this was a problem and rather than admitted it, they just built a patch into the latest version of QT. Interestingly, the files still don't play properly on my iPhone 3G with OS 3.1.3. Hope this works for you.

Also - I would HIGHLY recommend all of you get the iTalk app. It is way better and more reliable than the iPhone's native voice recorder. Ridiculous - and irresponsible - that Apple would put out such a crappy, buggy piece of software when people rely on voice memos so much. Are they becoming the Microsoft of the 21st Century?

I just found this discussion forum about 10 minutes ago because I was having the same problem that you guys were. I went to the IPhone Explorer website and they have developed a version for windows users. As for the people who are not able to get the .mov files to play back I was able to get my file to playback with the CCCP audio codec pack and windows media player classic installed. The only thing I need to do now is to slice up my memo so that I can e-mail it. I hope this helps.

Here is the Website for the CCCP Codec Pack and the Iphone Explorer Website.

CCCP: http://www.cccp-project.net/

Iphone Explorer: http://www.macroplant.com/iphoneexplorer/

Hi, thanks for the advice. How big is your mov-File? Mine is only 122 Bytes, so it's probably gone...

Best regards, Matt.

I too have the same problem. Had a 2 hour recording that would not play. iTunes would sync it to the PC. Tried to play the recording on the PC, but PC kept saying it was in an unrecognized format. Deleted it from the iPhone because it wouldn't play. Downloaded and installed iPhone Explorer. Looked in the recording directory on the iPhone and sure enough, there was a MOV version of the recording still on my iPhone that was 2 weeks old. Copied it to my desktop and it plays just fine. Thanks guys for pointing out iPhone Explorer. Also found other MOV versions of recordings in that directory that I thought were gone because they were lengthly recordings. Your right, APPLE needs to fix this issue. At some point, all of the left over MOV versions of the recordings will eventually fill up the data space on the iPhone.

Please help.

I went ahead and downloaded iPhone Explorer. I can see my apps but not my media. I assume my voice memos are in the Media folder. I notice from some of the screen shots in this forum that iPhone Explorer Beta is used. The version I downloaded today is only iPhone Explorer. Is there a different version? Is anyone else not seeing any options when they try to access their Media folder? Suggestions? Going forward I think I am going to buy an app for this - any recommendations here?