Recording a Voice Memo
iFocus@Hadley
Recording a Voice Memo
Presented by
Douglas Walker
March 14, 2016
Douglas Walker
Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we are going
to be recording a voice memo. Now we’ll be using the
Voice Memo app that’s built right into our iPhone. Now
this is a really nice app to use when you’re needing to
record either a short memo, such as grocery lists or phone
numbers, or even if you’re needing to record a longer
message, such as a lecture or even a meeting. This is a
really handy app and it’s one that I use all of the time.
So let’s go ahead and check it out so I’ll go ahead and flick
to that and find our Voice Memos app, and we’ll singlefinger double-tap to get started here. All right, now when
we first open the Voice Memos app, you’re typically placed
on the Voice Memos heading at the very top of the page
here. It’s just below the time in the status bar there. Now
the Voice Memo app has a really simple interface here
and we’re going to begin by just flicking through this page,
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Recording a Voice Memo
right-flicking through this page to just explore the page
here so I’ll flick to the right.
All right, so there’s our waveform area. Now this area is a
very visual area that shows the waveform as you’re
recording. Now it’s not going to be of much use to us
VoiceOver users because it is so visual, so I’ll just flick
past this so I’ll just flick to the right. Now the length simply
just shows us the length of the recording here so I’ll flick to
the right here. All right, now New Recording is the title of
the recording, and we’ll be prompted to give it our own
name when we’ve finished our recording here so I’ll just
flick to the right. Of course this is just simply the date that
we are recording right now so I’ll go ahead and flick to the
right again.
All right, here’s our Record button and I could just singlefinger double-tap to begin recording here and do that but
we’re going to check out the rest of the screen here, and
then we’ll come back here in just a minute to actually
perform a recording. All right, so let me just flick to the
right here. Now this is the Done button so when we’ve
finished our recording, we just single-finger double-tap on
this to complete our recording, so I’ll just go ahead and
flick to the right one more time to look at the rest of the
page here and here’s our saved memos.
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Now this is where you’re going to see a list of all our
previous recordings. However we don’t have any so
there’s no recordings in this list here and if we had
recordings here, we could just single-finger double-tap on
any of these to listen to them again, so everything is right
here and handy where you need it. All right, so that’s our
recording screen so let’s go ahead and go back to record
and actually make a recording so I’ll flick to the left again
and we’re looking for that Record button and there’s our
Record button right there.
Now when I activate the Record button, it’s going to turn
into a Pause button and I would single-finger double-tap to
activate that, and then I could single-finger double-tap
again to pause the recording at any time and then I could
just activate it to begin the recording again. Now when I
activate the Record button, you’re going to hear a little
sound to let you know that you’ve activated that and that’s
how easy it is, so let’s go ahead and do it and I’ll go ahead
and single-finger double-tap anywhere, now that we’re on
the Record button, to begin the recording and you heard a
little sound there to let you know that you’ve begun the
recording.
All right, now the Record button, we didn’t hear it. It didn’t
announce that because it didn’t want to do any VoiceOver
stuff so that you would hear it on your recording there, but
it has turned into a Pause button there so all I would have
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to do is perform another single-finger double-tap to pause
it and I’ll pause that to show you how it works, so I’m just
going to single-finger double-tap here and you heard that
little sound again to let you know that you’ve paused the
recording and I can single-finger double-tap to begin the
recording again and there it goes again and now I’ve
begun the recording again, so I paused it and then started
the recording back again.
Now once I’ve finished the recording, all I would have to
do is flick to the right and activate that Done button that’s
there. However if you don’t want to hear VoiceOver
talking and say Done button, you can always just pause
the recording before you leap over to that or flick over to
that Done button and pause it, but I’m just going to flick
over there to the Done button, flick to the right and of
course this recorded that VoiceOver there. You heard that
so I’m going to single-finger double-tap to stop this
recording, and we’re going to hear a prompt that’s going to
let us know that we need to name this recording so I’ll
single-finger double-tap on this Done button here.
All right, so we’ve had the prompt pop up and we’ve been
placed in an Edit field that wants us to name our new
recording here, and we have a standard QWERTY
keyboard that has popped up at the bottom of our screen
here so I’ll just name this recording that we just made. I’ll
name it Test but first I’ll need to delete the words “new
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recording” from our Edit field here, so I’ll just find our
Delete button in our keyboard here and we’ll just keep
hitting that [Delete button 0:06:11]. I’m deleting where it
says “new recording”. I hit the Return button here. Sorry.
Okay, so it should be gone there and so now I’m ready to
record the word “test” here, so I’ll go ahead and write the
word “test” in here. There’s the T. All right, so I have the
word “test” in there so what I’ll do is go up and check our
Edit field to make sure it’s correct here. Okay, so we have
the word “test” in there and I simply just touched in that
text edit area to check that. Now I’ll flick to the right and
find the Cancel button and we don’t want to cancel this. I
want to keep it, so I’m going to flick to the OK button, and
then I’ll simply just single-finger double-tap on that to save
this recording and name it “test”.
Okay, so now we’ve been placed on our Voice Memos
page where we can find a list of all of our recordings here,
but first let’s go ahead and explore this page before we
play our recording so I want to go up to our Edit button in
the top left here. All right, now this button allows us to
delete any old or unwanted recordings here, so I don’t
know that we’ll come back here because I’m going to
show you a much faster or easier way to do this in just a
minute. All right, so let me flick to the Voice Memos
heading. It’s still up there at the top part of the page there.
I’ll flick to the right.
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Now there’s our speaker. There’s our Speaker button
there and it’s in the top right. Activating this will turn on
our external speaker so that the recording can be heard by
others that are around you or by everyone that’s around
you. All right, so otherwise you’ll only be able to hear the
recording through the earpiece speaker that’s up here,
and you’ll need to raise the phone to your ear to listen to
that. All right, so let me flick to the right. Now there’s a
Record button again, and you could activate that again to
begin another recording.
All right, flicking us again places us on our Recordings list
down here now. All right, and these are the memos that
we’ve recorded or just recorded down here and we’re
given a lot of really great information. Now you have the
name of the recording, the date recorded and the length of
the recording there. Now I mentioned earlier that I’m
going to quickly show you how to delete a recording. Well,
now since you’ve landed on this or been placed on this,
you can flick up and down to be given some actions that
you can perform, so I’ll go ahead and show you how this
works. All right, I’ll flick down.
All right, now all I would need to do, since it said delete, is
single-finger double-tap to delete this recording so if I flick
down again, I can then activate this item and play this item
so that’s a quick way to do it. You just flick down and
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you’re given the option to delete and you would singlefinger double-tap on that, or you could flick again and you
could activate the item there so we’re going to go ahead
and do that. We’re going to activate this item here. All
right, so I’ll just go ahead and single-finger double-tap to
look at it here.
All right, so what we’ve been given is a player interface.
We haven’t been taken to another page. Another page
hasn’t opened up but what’s happened is our list down
here has expanded to give us some tools just below our
recording here or our recording title and everything here,
and we’ve been placed on the Play button there. Now
what I’d like to do is explore the rest of these player
options before I actually play this recording, so I’m going
to go ahead and flick to the right and we’ll find our track
position. We’ll find an adjustable bar here.
All right, now we could flick up to the advance forward or
flick down to move back through our recording there, so if
we knew that we wanted to – if it was a long recording and
we wanted to move forward through that before we started
listening to it, we could that right there. All right, let me
flick to the right again. All right, this Share button gives us
a few ways of being able to share this recording, so I’ll go
ahead and single-finger double-tap. I want to launch this
and show you the ways that we can share this app or this
memo.
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All right, AirDrop is really cool so you can share this file
with others around you that are using an iDevice. Of
course they need to be using at least an iPhone 5 and
running iOS 7 to be able to do that. All right, now flick and
there’s going to be a little description of what AirDrop is
here. All right, and what I can do is I can share this. I
have my AirDrop turned off right now because I’m making
this recording and didn’t want things to start popping up,
but what you can do is you can share this with others
wirelessly that are using AirDrop around you but
remember, you have to be using at least an iPhone 5 and
running iOS version 7 to be able to do that. All right, it
really is cool because you can share this recording with
just other people that are right around you in the area.
All right, so let me flick to the right and I’ll show you a
couple of other ways that you can share this memo. All
right, there’s message so we’re able to share this
recording as a text message with others as well so I’ll flick
to the right. There’s one more way that we can share this
memo and mail. We can also share it by emailing it as a
mail message there, so you can share this with just about
anyone that has capability of emails. All right, so I’ll flick
one more time and there’s a Cancel button, so we’re going
to cancel out of this menu here so I’ll just single-finger
double-tap on that.
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All right, so we’re placed back on the heading that’s at the
top of the page here, so I’m going to start flicking through
this. We’re going to go back through and find that Share
button here and quickly move through this. There’s the
Share button that we were on earlier so if I flick again,
we’re going to be placed on an Edit button here. Now the
Edit button allows us to be able to trim off the beginning or
the ending of a recording, so if you have stuff there that
you didn’t want at the beginning or the ending, it’ll give you
the ability to trim that off and for the sake of time, we’re not
going to really go into detail on this today. However it
really is nice to have a few more advanced editing
features that are available to us.
All right, so let me flick to the right to our last button down
here, and here’s another Delete button and I could singlefinger double-tap on that to delete this recording. All right,
but I’m not going to do that because we’re going to flick
back to the left and find that Play button. I’m going to flick
back to the left until I find it and there’s our Play button,
and this is how we play this memo now so I’m going to go
ahead and single-finger double-tap to activate the Play
button, and I’ll go ahead and single-finger double-tap to
pause this. Now you heard the Play button turn into a
Pause button when I activated it and then you know that
all you have to do is single-finger double-tap to get it
playing again so that’s pretty great.
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All right, so it’s great that VoiceOver reads all these labels,
and that’s why we really love iDevices because they are
so accessible to us. All right, so that’s how to use the
Voice Memos app. I really do love the simplicity of this
app and it’s an app that I really do use all the time. Again,
my name is Douglas Walker. Take care and I’ll see you
next time.
For more from the iFocus Series, including many other
topics of interest to individuals with vision loss, visit the
Videos@Hadley page on the Hadley Institute for the Blind
and Visually Impaired website at www.hadley.edu.
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