20 Tips For Using Voice Memos On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using the Voice Memos App on your Mac. 

The Voice Memos App on your Mac is a handy way to record notes using just your voice. You can record them, you can see the list of them, and you can play them back. But probably the best way to use Voice Memos is to have iCloud turned On so that you can record Voice Memos on your iPhone and then play them back on your Mac. 

So, on your Mac you want to go into System Settings and then go to your Apple Account or directly to iCloud here on the left. You can go to iCloud here though and then see all of the apps for iCloud. Scroll down towards the bottom and you'll see Voice Memos. Make sure that is turned On and if it is also turned On on your iPhone then the Voice Memos sync automatically. So record a voice memo on your iPhone while you're out and come back and it's there on your Mac waiting for you. 

Once you're viewing your Voice Memos you don't have to stick with the default name. It's easy to rename one. You can do it by clicking on the name here of the selected voice memo in the left sidebar. You can just type something to rename it. You could also do it by selecting the title at the top of the voice memo when it is selected. Now before you rename the voice memo you either get something like New Recording and then a number or you'll get a location. You can decide which one by going to Voice Memo Settings and then changing this checkbox here. If it's on then new voice memos will use your current location when you start recording. With it Off it is just going to use the generic new recording. You've got the same setting on the iPhone as well. On your Mac it's particularly useful to turn Off location-based naming because probably most of the time your Mac's in the same location, so the locationing doesn't really help. 

Now another setting here is the Audio Quality. You've got two choices. Lossy and Lossless. Lossless is going to produce the largest file but they'll be perfect quality. Lossy will compress the files. For most uses of voice memos lossy is going to be perfectly fine. It is going to be very high quality without the large file size. Now you have a lot more settings once you're playing back a voice memo. You, of course, play it back by selecting it and then using the Play Button here at the bottom or you can use the Spacebar to start and stop Playback. But if you click here you'll get options for Playback including the Playback speed. So to make things go a little faster just move this slider to the right. To make it go slower move it to the left. 

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If the voice recording quality isn't great, like there is a lot of background noise, look for Enhanced Recording. Select that and it will try to get rid of a lot of the background noise, echo, and things like that. Now if you recorded the voice memo using iPhone 16 or 17 it's actually using spatial audio to record. Instead of enhanced recording you'll see a switch for Studio Voice and then a slider to control the amount it's applied. So use either Enhanced Recording or Studio Voice to improve a bad recording so you can understand what is being said. Also notice this setting here. Skip Silence. This will only appear if your Mac detects that there are period of silence, pauses between words or sentences. So, if it does detect that then you have this switch here. You can turn this On and then when you play this back it's going to skip periods of silence. Watch as it does so right here. You can see it jump really quickly, like that. This allows you to, say, record with your iPhone while you're out and about and just let the silence exist there. You don't have to continuously pause every time you finished saying something and want to think of what to say next. You can just record with the silence knowing that when you play it back later, either on your iPhone or your Mac, you can choose to skip all those pieces of silence to just hear when you were actually talking. 

Now here when you're playing back the audio you can grab this little line here and drag it left or right to jump around in your voice memo. But you could also click on this button and you'll see the transcript that's automatically created by your Mac of what's being said. So it is handy to see the transcripts certainly. But you could also use this to navigate. If you just click on a word it jumps to that part of the recording. Now in addition to the transcripts being used so that you can visually see what's going on while you're playing it back and jump around you can also use them for Search. So you've got, say, a ton of recordings and you want to find the recording where you've said specific things. You can Search here and the results are going to be shown here on your left. It's basically filtering your voice memos with these words and, of course, here it finds that in the title but it is also looking inside of the actual transcript itself. So you can see it's, of course, in this transcript but it's also here in this one. 

Now when you record a new voice memo, like this, you can at any time pause and then resume. But in addition to being able to resume you can also go back to a previous point and resume from there. It'll delete everything after this point and replace it with what you're saying now. You can also do that with older recordings. It doesn't look like you can at first. If you go to the older recording, like that, you can just start a new recording. It doesn't look like there is a way to resume. But if you go to the Edit Mode, like that, then you'll see you can replace here from the beginning, which is probably not what you want to do, but you can go all the way to the end and you can resume recording, even an old voice memo like that. 

Now also when you're here in Editing Mode you can trim a recording. You need to click this button here at the top right. This only appears in Edit Mode. Click that and now you can select a portion of the recording, like this. Then you can trim to that portion, or you can delete that portion. Once you're sure you've gotten it right you can click Apply. Then click Done and you can Save this trimmed version as a new recording or save it over the existing recording. This means you can also extract something from a recording. If you have a really long recording and you want to take a specific piece out of it then you would go into that recording in Edit Mode, like that. Then you would select the Trimmed Tool there. You would select the portion that you want to extract, like this. Trim to it and then Apply. Then when you click Done you save it as a new recording instead. Now you have your original recording and the new extracted one as separate items. 

Once you start to get a lot of voice memos here you can organize them by creating folders. Click this button here which opens up an additional sidebar to the left of the list of all recordings. Here you can see all recordings and recently deleted. But you can also create folders here. Click this button to create a new folder. Create a new folder with a name and create as many folders as you want. You can drag and drop into those folders. You're are still going to see all your recordings under All Recordings. But, if you just view that folder you'll see just that subset there. You can also export these as regular audio files. You do it just by dragging and dropping. So you just select and drag the item here from the left and just drag it to the Desktop or any Finder window and it performs an export. You'll get either an M4A file or a QTA file depending upon whether it's spatial audio or not. You can open this with any other app that handles that kind of file, like for instance Quick Time Player. You can also bring it into places like iMovie and GarageBand or into other audio apps and convert it to something else if you like.

You can also Import files like this. So, if you've recorded something and you've got it in M4A format, say you recorded in Quick Time Player or some other app, you can drag it into the left sidebar and it will import into Voice Memos. Not only then will you be able to treat it like a regular voice memo but it will even transcribe everything that's in there. 

Now how about exporting just the transcripts. So you've got a voice memo recorded. You've got the transcript and maybe that's all you really want. There doesn't seem to be a way to export this. But you can certainly select all of the text, just select a piece of it and then use Command A, Select All, and then Command C to Copy. Then you can go into any other app, like here I am in TextEdit, and paste in the transcript. Or you just Drag & Drop. Once you have it all selected you can start dragging the text just like from any other app. Switch to the app you want to drop it in to and drop it in there. 

Now let's say you want to actually listen to your transcript and take notes. Well, Voice Memos doesn't have that ability but Notes does. Notes also handles transcripts. But if you recorded something in Voice Memos you can easily move it over to Notes. Just select the Voice Memo, go to Share here, and then select Notes. It's going to create a New Note with that Voice Memo in it. You can add some text to it right here or just Save and then let's go to Notes now and we'll see this new Voice Memo right here. It's just like if you had recorded it in the Notes App. You can play it back. You can double click it here and you can see the transcript, get a summary, and all of that. So you can convert from a regular Voice Memo to a Voice Memo in Notes. 

Now I pointed out before that when you delete a note, like let's delete this one here just by selecting it and pressing the Delete Key on the keyboard, let's also delete this one here, and then let's go to the leftmost sidebar here again. You'll see Recently Deleted and they are all here. These should get deleted within thirty days. You've got a setting for this in Voice Memos Settings right here. You could change it to one day, seven days, Never, or Immediately. So if you always want your Voice Memos to immediately delete with no safety net change it to Immediately. Or you can just leave it at 30 days and if you ever want something to be deleted Immediately you can go into Recently Deleted, select it here, and click Delete. This will delete that note immediately. So you can do it on a one-by-one basis. You've also got Delete All here to delete everything that is in Recently Deleted right now. 

If you've got more than one microphone on your Mac you may be wondering where the setting is to choose which microphone you'll be using. Well, Voice Memos doesn't have an individual setting. It's going to follow the System's Setting. If you're not familiar with that you go into System Settings and then you want to look for Sound. Then you're going to want to go to Input. This is where you can select the current microphone. So Select the microphone that you want to use. You can select the Input Volume here as well and test it out. This works in most apps unless the app has a specific setting for choosing a microphone. 

Now to start a recording in Voice Memos you need to go to the Voice Memos App and then find this Red Button and click it or use the File, Start New Recording command. But there are ways to do it with fewer steps. One way to do it is from the Dock but a prerequisite is Voice Memos has to be currently running. Then you can Control Click, right click, two-finger click, or just Click and Hold the Voice Memos icon in the Dock and go right to New Recording. It doesn't just take you to the Recording Screen. It automatically starts recording. So it is a quick way to do it. You can also use Siri to do it. I've got Type to Siri turned On but you can just do it as a Voice Command. You can just say Record Voice Memo and Siri will start the recording immediately, like that. 

Now here's one bonus tip. You may think that when you go into the Transcript Mode here and you can see the transcript that there will be some way to quickly summarize the Voice Memo. After all if you recorded something for a long time and you just want to get a summary of what it is you should be able to do it here. But there's no option for that. However, that's built into macOS. You don't need it an option in Voice Memos. You can select just a portion of this or all of it. I'm going to use Command A to select the entire thing. Then you can just Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on it. The Writing Tools that's part of Apple Intelligence is listed there. You can select that and then just choose Summary. You could also choose Key Points and the other options there. Then you get a summary right there that you can read or even copy to the Clipboard. 

So I hope you found these tips for using Voice Memos on your Mac useful. Thanks for watching.