Unable to Share/Export Call Recordings from Notes App

After trying so many ways to share a 5-hour call recording, without any success, I was able to airdrop it to a friend.

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?

I started having the same problem. I’ve been recording phone interviews since mid-Jan for a research project. I no longer can play back audio or see transcripts for two of the longer calls (each over 1hr). I also can’t save, duplicate, or share those call audio files, even after trying the renaming trick.

12 other recordings, each under 1hr, work properly with audio playback and transcripts.

I attached two screenshots.

• One shows how a proper call recording (with playback and transcript) looks in my Notes app.
• The other screenshot shows that the call was recorded and included in the Notes app, but doesn’t provide access to playback audio or to read the call transcript.

I called Apple Support. The team lead was nice and said she had to write a “ticket” for the engineers because she didn’t have any material from Apple about this issue. Crossing my fingers that Apple has a solution!

This problem (Call Recordings not able to Save to Files or to Share) is also happening on my iPhone 13Pro, running iOS 18.3.2, with a 1.5 hour recording, as well as two 15 second recordings ... so it is NOT limited to just long recordings.

It DID work once with one of the two 15 second Call Recordings ... but it stopped working even with that one.

Would somebody here please explain Ninastr's step #1?

How does one sync notes from iPhone to computer?

Thanks!

Ted

You need to go into iCloud Settings on your phone, and make sure your iCloud syncs Notes. Then you need to go into iCloud Settings on your computer, and make sure it is syncing notes from your phone.

I don't even use Mac but happen to have a really old mac laptop, and on there iCloud is almost like a separate program. But i went in, checked the box so it is syncing my notes, and then that folder Ninastr mentioned appeared and i was able to get to it.

From my extensive testing so far, it has to do with the length. I haven’t had a short recording fail. I use it every day as a journalist which is why I’m so guns-ho to find a solution!

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.

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!!

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.

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!

For reference, I am having this issue with a brand new iPhone 16 pro running iOS 18.3, so it is not unique to older phones.

And just to clarify, when the feature was first added this fall I was able to transcribe and share/save hour-long calls without any issue. It took a couple minutes to transcribe but nothing close to the endless spinning wheel I get now. And I used to be able to save those calls to my dropbox or google drive no problem.

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.

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.