Q: voice memos not showing up in itunes

Thank you so much! This is the only thing that worked for me.

I agree with what cakfr said:  pathetic, evil behavior on Apple's part.

In case the name of the application is censored again even as catkfr spelled, it, its name is a combination of the letter that begins most popular Apple products followed by the name of the tree navigation system used in Windows OS, equivalent to (and in important ways better than) Finder in the Mac.

Nicely done.   Also, the link in the pst by  john_job entry feb 20, works even though the-application-that-shall-not-be-named shows up as asterisks. 

But copying the link doesn't work, you  have to click in his comment.  In any case,  macroplant.com has a small enough roster of apps that people should find what theyr'e looking for.  Whoever said it was freeware though is not correct, at least not now.

Thanks a lot FeelMyBass!

Tried so many steps advised here but only yours working for me phew~

Mine is iPhone 4 (iOS 5.1.1), iTunes 11.0.2 though for reference purpose

I read this workaround on another thread & it worked for me:

1. Disconnect your phone from iTunes
2. In your phone, go to voice memos app
3. Select the voice memo you want to transfer
4. Assign a category by clicking the grey arrow in the voice memo info screen
5. Click Trim Memo
6. Don't trim anything, just click Trim Voice Memo in the trim window
7. Repeat steps 2-6 for each memo you want to transfer
8. Sync with iTunes, and the memos should show up now.

APPLE seriously need to get this fix! What's the point of having technology that put us in a situation in which we are spending more time trying to get things fix after paying for the gadget? /shakesfist

And I will go fill up the complaint/feedback form too. Thanks all

I don't know why I did it (I guess I got tired of the pop-up menu luring me into downloading the latest version of iTunes) but before and after doing this 2 days ago, things went from bad to worse on my iPhone 4s and my Voice Memos. Then I saw the growing community of miserable people who had placed their trust in Apple as I did. I tried just about everything--including plugging in, plugging out, unchecking, rechecking etc. and went to my old standby "woman vs. machine" mindset: have confidence that as an experienced user of tech, you will win when challenged by technology because you are intuitive. Just as they said at the dawn of the personal computer, it is intuitive (even if some of your programmers are not).

Then, I played around with the idea that ultimately I could move things back and forth between my iPhone and iTunes on my laptop. I depend on Voice Memos when I record interviews with clients. It should be a fast, easy and productive way for a writer to capture information and then log it to create documents, articles, posts and more. Of course, I didn't expect Apple to create all of these challenges. Here is what I think users of Apple products want in this case:

• use the iPhone as an obvious tool to record voice
  

• organize the information and preserve it by backing it up in the iTunes library or somewhere convenient on your hard drive
  

• customize the above to user preference, i.e., decide according to the task how long the voice memo will be without having to trim the size, as well as what method for transfer (email, message) and where and how you can send it. That doesn't seem like a tall order given that Apple makes some nice change off of the available productivity apps.
  

• allow the user to determine how many memos to store on either the phone or laptop given the amount of space available. Very simple, no?
  

Learning that there may be "bugs" that require fixes isn't good enough. In fact, it is unacceptable. The discussions in this thread cover 3 years of aggravation!!

Here is what worked for me:

• closed iTunes and unplugged my device
  
• accepted that my phone would automatically sync with iTunes.
  
• used my phone as the command and control.
  
• in Music on my iPhone 4S, used the "Add a New Playlist" option
  
• at the bottom menu, beginning with Playlists, clicked on "More" which takes you to the menu beginning with "Audiobooks" and then clicked on Genres.
  
• in Genres, it offered me the choice of Voice Recordings and clicked on that to add that as my new Playlist!
  
• my new Playlist was defined as Copied Items on my phone.
  
• plugged my phone back into my laptop, opened up iTunes and voila!! --- in the left Taskbar under Playlists was the new playlist Copied Items, but it represented absolutely all of my voice memos that I had recorded dating back to a year ago. Now the full set is stored in my iTunes library. It didn't have to be this hard to accomplish a task that was supposed to boost my productivity!!!!!
  

Yikes, Apple! I don't want to buy or download any third-party software or openware to fix what you should have done right in the first place. Next thing we know as we leave your retail stores will be the tagline inside the apple "Waste time and money--yours, of course!"

I have an iPhone 5 and iTunes 11 on a MacBook pro (late 2011). Thankfully, the solution was simple but it has taken me hours of trial and error to find it. Going ITunes Preferences -> Devices -> Prevent iPods, iPhones and iPads from syncing automatically. Check the box for that last item and perform the sync again.

A sync takes a long time because it performs a backup as it does it. It is rediculuos that people have been having issues syncing voice memos with iTunes since 2010 and earlier. Just do a Google search. I doubt I'll buy an iPhone again. They generally are really good but not fixing sync for a three year period is an insult to the customer.

I have spent 75 minutes on the phone with apple support.  The only thing they can tell me is that my files are corrupted.  They had me do all kinds of resets and backups and basically nothing worked.  In addition to all the wasted time I need to reinstall all my icons and reconfigure my VPN and various settings.  All I wanted to do is copy a single voice memo from my phone to my Imac.  My Iphone 5 is not jailbroken and I cannot figure out why they won't take responsibility for this issue.  This is the worst customer service I have seen in a long long time.   Comparable to United Airlines back in the day. 

I have an Imac, Ipad, Macbook Air, and Nano.  I have had every version of the Iphone back to the 3.  I can honestly say that it will be highly unlikely I will be purchasing another Iphone going forward.  At some point as a consumer I have a right to push back.

I used finder and went to folder for voicememo under itunes and moved everything out of there to another folder. then I went to the phone and opened each voicememo, clicked on trim, didn't do anything, waited a second, and then classified the memo into one of the categories.

After doing those two things on the phone, I resynced and the memos appeared in the finder folder under voice mails.

This whole process is ridiculous. I agree with above posts. This is a critical feature of the iphone and to just let it be botched up is consistent with the generally degraded performance of all apple software. 

Another great American company gets eaten alive by hubris, poor management, and not being hungry.

I think I was one of the first to comment here, and giving some tips that did work for me, even if a bit confusing. Then things got more complicated, like seeing a 30 min voice memo showing up in iTunes (where I could play it but not delete), but nowhere appearing in the iPhone. Everybody here got really upset with Apple, after so many years no solution. So, I gave up and bought the software we are not allowed to talk about (cost me around USD 30). Call it eye-explorer. Now that was not only a solution, it was showing things were much much worse: it shows the Voice Memos but I also found another folder in the iPhone called "Recordings". The files are mostly .m4a, one is .mov. A total of 13 files totally hidden, old voice memos that were supposed to have been deleted more than a year ago. With the software I copied them to my MAC and then deleted them. So, if you think your problem is not being able to download your "existing" voice memos, it could be worse. I know it ***** we have to buy a software that we don't need in theory. What choice? As to avoid censorship, I am copying this and will publish on my blog.strategy4china.com later on.

Voice memos are really in a desolate shape.

I had to delete some of my older memos, then do the "trim without really trimming".

HTH,

Gab.

The censors were at work here but if they think they are smart, it's online already on my blog, on cnet dwonload etc. Living in China we are used to censorship and we play around. Shows how much Apple cares!

Trimming worked for me also . . .

Quit iTunes & unplug phone from computer

For each voice memo, click blue arrow on right, click "trim", but don't really trim anything

Plug phone back in to computer (open iTunes if needed), select your phone and click sync

iPhone 4s, ios 6.1.3,

MacBook Air, OSX 10.7.5,

iTunes 11.0.2

BTW, has anyone tried any of the many sound recording apps in the app store instead of the standard voice memo app? Is there a way to easily get those sound files into your itunes folder? Seeing that no one who uses those has posted in this thread, maybe those other apps help avoid this whole mess??

Hi.

I had the same problem and any workaround has worked for me accept third party software.

People's already mentioned iExplorer, but it's not free and demo version just let you import 10 voice memos at the time

I've found a good free software: iFunBox.

It let me download all my voice memos at once and more.

See ya

I just wonder if that software lets you discover the many hidden files I found with astonishment, with the paying software. I prefer to pay that small money than to waste valuable time in messing around to find a solution. I know it is not "right" because Apple should solve the problem, but...

Hiya, apologies in advance if this has already been covered previously, but I don't have time to scan through 15 pages at the moment - I have had quite a few problems with Voice Memos that exist on my iPhone 4 not appearing in iTunes or in the iTunes Media

I managed to find them all by searching in  the iTunes Media\Voice Memos folder (on my PC).  However, the phone gave the date that the Memo was recorded, so I searched on my PC for a typical file name of the date in reverse order (eg, "20110915" for all Memos recorded on 15th September 2011), and it turned out they had somehow been categorised as "Music" and had been filed in iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Unknown Artist\Unknown Album

I then went into iTunes to find them and re-categorised them as Voice Memos.  I could have probably also done the same search in iTunes to start with, but I'm not a big fan of the format of search results in iTunes.

So check your Unknown Artist / Unknown Album categories, you might just find your lost memos.

Hope this helps some of you!