How to record audio on your iPhone and quickly edit or export your recordings
- You can record audio on your iPhone using its built-in Voice Memos app.
- Using Voice Memos, you can also edit and share the recordings you’ve made.
- Third-party apps from the App Store can provide more advanced recording and editing features.
Sometimes you need to record a thought quickly or, perhaps, you’re interviewing someone and only have your iPhone on hand.
In either case, the iPhone has a great built-in app for this: Voice Memos.
Using the Voice Memos app, you can not only record voice notes, as the name suggests, but also edit and share them with whomever you’d like.
If you are concerned that the Voice Memos app is too low quality or unprofessional, think again. Taylor Swift, Adele, and Mick Jagger have used the Voice Memos app on their iPhones to share song ideas or demo recordings with their collaborators. Sometimes these snippets even make it into finished songs.
Here’s how to record and edit using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone.
Quick tip: While the Voice Memos app is quite good, it won’t let you record a phone call. There are several quality paid apps you can use to record calls on an iPhone should you need to.
How to record audio on iPhone with the Voice Memos app
1. Locate the Voice Memos app, which may be in your phone’s Extras or Utilities folder; it says “Voice Memos” under it and has an image of an audio graph.
Tap the “Voice Memos” app.
Steven John/Insider
2. Launch the app, and note the large red circle at the bottom. When you tap that, a new recording will start.
Tap the red circle to begin a new recording.
Kyle Wilson/Insider
3. To stop recording, tap the red square at the bottom of the screen.
Tap the red square to stop your recording.
Kyle Wilson/Insider
And as far as the basics go, that’s it — that’s how you record audio on your phone. But there are a few other things to explore within the Voice Memos app.
Quick tip: For more advanced audio recordings, particularly those geared toward the production of music, podcasts, and the like, you might try GarageBand for iPhone, which singer-producer Steve Lacy famously used to record a track for Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning 2017 album “DAMN.”
How to edit and export an audio file on Voice Memos
To rename a recording, tap the word “New Recording 1” (assuming this is your first) and type in a name.
To add more to your recording after you stopped it, tap the three blue dots beside it, then hit Edit Recording. Scroll to the end of the timeline, hit Resume to recommence the recording. Just be sure you scrolled to the end, or you will be replacing audio rather than adding more to the end.
Quick tip: You can also crop the edges of the audio file through the same Edit Recording feature. Just tap on the square icon with two vertical lines at opposite corners (of the square) on the top right of the window.
Tap the crop button to trim the recording.
Kyle Wilson/Insider
To share an audio recording, exporting it to apps or sending it to others, again tap the three blue dots beside a recording and click Share to open sharing options.
Choose an editing option or export your audio file with “Share…”.
Kyle Wilson/Insider
Steven John is a freelance writer living near New York City by way of 12 years in Los Angeles, four in Boston, and the first 18 near DC. When not writing or spending time with his wife and kids, he can occasionally be found climbing mountains. His writing is spread across the web, and his books can be found at www.stevenjohnbooks.com
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Kyle Wilson is an editor for the Reference team, based in British Columbia, Canada. Outside of Insider, his work has also appeared in publications like The Verge, VICE, Kotaku, and more. He periodically guest co-hosts the Saturday tech show “Tech Talk” on the iHeartRadio station C-FAX 1070.
Feel free to reach out to him on Twitter, where he can be found most of the time, @KWilsonMG
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