As a test I created a voice memo on my iPhone then used AirDrop to transfer it to my MacBook wirelessly. It appeared immediately in Finder‘s view of Downloads and I just clicked on it to play it back.
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If you have a Windows PC/laptop then another method to transfer Voice Memos is using iTunes. The genre is not included by default so you need to make a change to Sync settings:
1. Attach the iPhone to the Windows device using the Apple data/charging cable.
2. In iTunes, select the iPhone icon itself from the selection toolbar:
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This is so you can see the Settings menu in the sidebar as well as the Devices menu.
3. Under Settings (shown as a), select Music (shown as b).
4a. Put a tick in the Sync Music checkbox (shown as c):
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This will enable syncing of the entire music library.
4b. Alternatively, you may wish to be more selective by changing the option from Entire music library to Selected playlists, artists, albums and genres then putting a tick in either Voice Memos under Playlists or Voice Memo under Genre (or both).
5. Either way, when you click on the Sync button (bottom right of the iTunes window), your voice menus should be transferred to your Windows filesystem.
6. Disconnect the iphone (using the Eject icon alongside the device name).
Note that you don’t even need to find an Apple data/charge cable. You can sync over wifi by amending the options for your iOS device within iTunes then applying the change. Once set, starting iTunes on your Windows device will trigger Bonjour into looking for your iOS devices to sync automatically if they are within wifi range. It’s not as fast as using a cable but it’s convenient.
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Once sync’d, you can play the voice memos from within iTunes. If you need/want to find them in the Windows filesystem then probably the quickest method is to just right-click on a voice memo and choose Show in Windows Explorer:
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Note also that automatic backups using the This computer option are much faster than the default iCloud option (and don’t use your default 5GB iCloud allowance nor any data plan allowance). If you’ve ever experienced the utter misery of trying to do a restore from iCloud over a poor connection then you’ll know what I mean. 🙂
I haven’t found a method to transfer voice memos to, say, Linux Mint 18.3. Whilst Cinnamon and Mate both detect and automount the iPhone, their respective file managers show an iPhone solely as a camera rather than giving access to the full filesystem:
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Linux Mint Xfce detects and automounts the iPhone but doesn’t display it on the desktop nor open it for display.
Looking at this article I believe there may be a way to get Linux Mint to recognise the iPhone’s filesystem but it’s not straightforward. The article is nearly a year old and Apple have since changed the iOS filesystem.
(As for macOS, I believe the latest versions of macOS and iOS now share the same filesystem. I have a tutorial session at my local Apple store tomorrow so I’m going to ask more questions.)
Hope this helps…
