Unable to Share/Export Call Recordings from Notes App

I got this to work for me. Here's some more precise clarification for how I did it, in case anyone can use this.

1. On my iPhone, in Notes app, I moved the Call Recording Note I wanted the audio of from "iCloud" to "On My iPhone".
2. I plugged my iPhone into Mac's USB port
3. I followed ninastr's instructions #2-5 (on March 3 of this thread/chat)
4. Once in that group.com/apple.notes, there was an "accounts" AND a "media" folder. (not exactly "'accounts' and then 'media'", that ninastr mentioned).
5. There was nothing in my "media" folder.
6. In my "accounts" folder was a "DCD6FF10-1D79-4036-AEC4-6ED516544CFA" folder. Inside that folder was a "media" folder, and inside of that was 23 folders. (not exactly "'accounts' and then 'media'", that ninastr mentioned)
7. I sorted the folders in Finder, by Date Modified, saw the most recently modified folder was modified today, looked inside, and there was my desired audio recording! (moments_03_17_18_34_06-audio.MOV)
8. I copied that file (right-click > Copy), then pasted it in a more convenient folder.

Done - Thanks ninastr!

FURTHERMORE (to any Apple techs/staff reading this):

If you made Notes an available app to access when iPhone is plugged into Mac, in Finder > iPhone > Files, then we could've more easily extracted the Call Recording, since your current iOS isn't functioning correctly.

Same here, also a journalist and this is such a useful function (being able to record straight from the call) but I cannot for the life of me find a way to then transfer to my laptop. In desperation I had to just open up Otter (transcription) and play out the call from my laptop to record it again!!

I've noticed that, eventually, the calls will process. The "Preparing..." screen of death eventually goes away so you can share the audio, and a transcript eventually shows up. It seems to be correlated with the recording length: The longer the phone call recording, the longer it takes to process.

I've been able to successfully access hour-long conversations after about 24-48 hours. Sometimes the transcript comes first, sometimes the share feature, sometimes both at the same time.

Makes me wonder if there's just a backlog on Apple's side to processes these files and they've opted to prioritize shorter files/calls ... (Could also explain why no one seemed to have this problem the first few weeks after the feature was released, when it had relatively few users.) It also seems like continuing to load the "Preparing..." screen may move the process along after (as slow as it still is).

Just my observation! Please feel free to contest/point out counter examples if this doesn't seem true for you.

Did they run diagnostics on your iPhone remotely? Was your ticket ever escalated to the engineering team, and are you able to call-in to get updates on the ticket?

Usually support would like users to perform a factory reset on their device to make sure a simple “reset”, doesn’t help to resolve the issue before escalating a ticket.

I would go through the whole process myself to get this issue escalated for everyone but I’m not in the position to do so, as I would need a computer to do the type of Reset and Restore they’d recommend.

I think they aren’t asking anyone to reset their phone because they know it won’t help. This happens to everyone. I do IT support for a large number of journalists and this happens to all of them (including me on a brand new iPhone 16). I can pretty much guarantee that resetting your phone would result in nothing but self torture. C’mon, Apple -fix this!

I tried the workarounds mentioned here and nothing worked for me. However, someone on a Reddit thread recommended taking the note in your phone, clicking on the option to share, but instead of selecting "collaborate" select "send a copy" and that should enable you to export it places. That seemed to work for me. I was able to airdrop the note to my macbook, locate the file in finder, and then find a software online to convert from .mov to .mp3.

It was tedious but man I'm just glad to have figured out something.

This is absolutely brilliant! Thank you so much. This helped me not spend hours trying to download and save the recording in all these different ways that weren't working.

I'm going to add to this. Updating your #7 that will save time as well (I didn't read others' comments to see if they did this or not)

#7. Change the viewer to "list" and then click on "Date Modified" this will save you the hastle of poking around in random files.

This is insane... It really should not be this difficult to access. Sending blank "notes" without the recording is a waste of time..

I am trying to upload to Plaud so I can use the AI features for taking notes. Can't save this outside of the notes app for anything!!

I'm now at the point where I am playing it back with the plaud device recording. This feels so 1980.

And they wonder why people choose Samsung/Android products ..ughh

I'm a journalist as well and I use recordings with just this goal in mind. I've been going through gyrations to export the audio into Otter - generally just playing the recording on my phone while Otter plays on my laptop.

Can you please tell me how you saved it to Dropbox? I can't figure that part of it out!

If you have a mac computer you can get them out of your phone with Ninastr's advice:

This happened to me and after many hours of trying everything to get the audio off my phone a friend finally found a workaround.

1. Get the note onto your Macbook by syncing notes from iPhone to computer.
2. Go out to your main user folder, the one that contains Documents, Desktop, etc. You can find this by clicking the desktop and hitting command-shift-h
3. Hit Command shift period which should reveal hidden folders.
4. Go to the Library folder
5. Go to Group Containers then group.com.apple.notes
6. Under "accounts" and then "media" there are a million folders with different files saved to notes.
7. It should be in there somewhere — you may have to poke around for awhile if you have many folders.

Hope this works for you guys too!

I'm responding just to acknowledge I'm suffering from the same problem with similar consequences (need the phone interview recordings for editing at work.)

I've occasionally been able to get it to save the "note" (which is blank since the transcription is not working on long calls anymore even though they used to), but the audio file is not saving whatsoever.

While this obviously is an iOS bug that hopefully will be resolved with a future update, I am hoping someone can provide some sort of workaround that might allow me to get the actual recording off the phone so I can use it.

GMServices, in response to your suggestions:

1. There "Duplicate" option when trying to share a Call Recording
2. You're not describing an option to "Save to Voice Memos". No option exists. Your suggestion is to play it and re-record it into another device. That's not a solution, it's a workaround that does degrade the audio quality.
3. As I already stated, if your call recording is of a long call (say an hour long), you can see it from your iCloud account on a PC, but it will not download. Shorter calls will download as expected.
4. I have 64GB of free space on my phone. This is not the issue.
5. I am running iOS 8.3 on an iPhone 16 pro.

Clearly, anyone who tries to record a longer length call (maybe 20 minutes or so or shorter) is having this issue. It was obviously not tested on longer calls in the currently released version. Please test this yourself on an hour long call so you can see that we are right.

on the attachments page from the front of the notes app, I can see my phone recordings listed. Those top two are over one hour and when I hold on it says “unsupported file format”

two photos attached to show

[Edited by Moderator]

that DID WORK... for one call (56m long). But then sadly it wouldn't work for the next two I tried renaming! Thanks so much for sharing! I wonder what exactly that did to the file to change it?

Last night i was recording a long interview.. at about the 30 minute mark i remembered to stop then restart the recording. the rest of the inteview was about an hour. The 30-minute clip saves and the hour-one doesn't. At least for now I'm going to try to remember to stop recordings at 30.

Glad I found this thread. First time using this feature yesterday. Love the functionality of it, including the transcript!

Two calls made using an iPhone SE (newest hardware model MNAM3LL/A), 18.3.1 update.

First call was 23 mins, transcript available soon after and easy to share by air drop.

Second call, simultaneously after, was 53 mins, no transcript processed (just a time clock that never processes) and unable to share by air drop.

I'm wondering where I can access the Notes on my mac desktop when I plug the phone in. It's not in "Files" and I definitely have the checkbox marked for store on iPhone not on iCloud. Do I need to make a smart folder?

The only way I was able to access the phone call as a file was to replay it through headphones into a voice recorder.

Very thankful I found this thread as I initially worried Apple transcript might have incorrectly identified some joke or phrase in the message and flagged it for content in some way. That's a dystopian reaction but it made no sense otherwise. Why would one call work but the other one not? An error message AT THE LEAST would benefit here. Otherwise it just freaks people out who need the recorded call for business, journalism, or even sentimental reasons. If not fixed it might lead people to think the transcript feature is a monitor on content, not a tool for transcribing.

Thanks again for everyone's replies! This seems a bug and not a censoring feature.

Mostly curious how to access a recorded call without iCloud when plugging the phone into a Mac desktop. It is possible?