How Can Apple Make Exporting Voice Memos Not Be a Ruinous Waste of Time?
How Can Apple Make Exporting Voice Memos Not Be a Ruinous Waste of Time?
I've been using Voice Memos since 2009 and appreciate all the sounds and ideas it's enabled me to capture. Tools have been added and those are helpful, too.
BUT! The app has never made it easy to manage the recorded audio files. I have always had to devote significant time to organizing the files and file names to allow me to use them, on my Mac, and *listen to them* as a group. I want to listen to them! Not one by one but, as a playlist, please. To do this, I need to get them out of Voice Memos but listening to them, in context, in the order they were recorded, has been and continues to require unnecessary manual labor.
Naming conventions have shifted multiple times, through the years, but the app still doesn't deliver the file name I need to preserve titles I input, for Voice Memos, AND time data, at once.
Problem #1. Naming the memo, in the app, doesn't apply the name to the actual file name, if I locate it in the Finder. The actual files are at ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.voicememos/Recordings
At least, this version of the Voice Memo is sorted by date and in the way that preserves context, i.e. 20131215 074938-73C33C1E.m4a. But, if I grab these files for a Music App playlist, I lose the identifying location or Title that I took the time to write in. So, this method of exporting files does not satisfy my reasonable expectations.
Problem #2. In the current 2022 instance of Voice Memo App, if I Airdrop or Send or Drag & Drop the Voice Memo, I get a file that retains the Voice Memo's name but loses the its stamp. The exported files show a new time stamp, generated when the export happens. So, I can't listen to them in contextual, chronological order, without MANUALLY editing the filenames. This is the Ruinous Waste of Time.
The way I did this (if anyone is curious) was by editing the Voice Memos' file names, in the app itself.
I added a timestamp date, before the file name, by observing the date displayed in the Voice Memo App, for the individual Voice Memo. I typed the date in manually, at first, and copy/pasted it into the Voice Memo titles, pasting i.e. "20210813", before the filename, and then lightly editing the date, as I moved up, so I would only have to edit a few numbers at a time, per day or month. So, I would wind up pasting "2022060" -leaving the last column empty- and then add the next number(s) representing the days, updating the copy, in the clipboard, as I progressed through the zeros, tens and twenties, etc. So, I wound up with something like, "20210813 voice-memo-filename" which is easily sorted in the Finder for my playlists.
But, come on! MacOS is one of the best operating systems in the world. Why was this necessary? Please, Apple, use your computing power to save us all this busy work.
So, to answer "How Can Apple Make Voice Memos Not Be a Ruinous Waste of Time?" please let us export or drag and drop these Voice Memo files, with date and title, in the file names that show up in the finder. Like, "20210813 voice-memo-filename."
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