Location of Apple Voice Memos in macOS

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macOS Sonoma · 2023.11.03 Update

Apple changed the location of Voice Memos audio files in macOS Sonoma. They are located in the Recordings folder inside of ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.VoiceMemos.shared/.

/Users/john/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.VoiceMemos.shared/Recordings

Previous macOS versions

If you are wondering where the audio files of your Apple Voice Memos are, in case you want to browse through them, see their file sizes, or copy or remove them, they are located in the com.apple.voicememos folder inside of ~/Library/Application Support.

That's the Library folder inside of your macOS username. For instance, if your username were john, the following would be your full path.

/Users/john/Library/Application Support/com.apple.voicememos

These audio recordings might have been recorded on your Mac or iOS devices (such as iPad or iPhone) and synchronized via iCloud. And even when your voice recordings appear on all your devices, Apple doesn't make it easy to find the audio files of your voice memos.

You can also drag and drop the recordings in the macOS interface to a Finder folder or the Desktop or send them over AirDrop to your laptop from iOS. I usually name the files on iOS, so they are properly named when sent over AirDrop.

Hope that helps!

For developers: Where are voice memos stored on Mac

You can immediately open the Voice Memos directory by running the following command on Terminal. The file location containing your recordings will open on Finder.

open ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.voicememos

Path of Voice Memos on iOS

Josh shared with me on Instagram that, on iOS 7, 13, 14, and probably 15 as well, you can find the voice memos at /private/var/mobile/Media/Recordings/ and that there's also an SQLite database at that location with the expected filenames. However, the structure of that database does change over time.

Looking for Voice Memos in a new Mac?

Note that your iCloud Voice Memos won't sync to your Mac until you've opened the Voice Memos app at least once when running macOS (say, Monterey or Ventura).

Here's how you can verify that your Voice Memos are syncing¹.

• On your Mac: Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click Apple ID, click iCloud in the sidebar, select iCloud Drive, click Options, then select Voice Memos in the list of apps.

• On your iOS or iPadOS device: Go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud, then turn on Voice Memos.

If you've enabled iCloud on your devices, notes recorded on any device will show on every device that has the same iCloud account enabled, including the iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, and Mac Pro.

Further help

It doesn't seem like Apple is making it easier to find the voice memo mac file location.

After the response to this post, I recorded the video at the top of this post. You can see the full transcription, in which I explain how to get to the com.apple.voicememos folder step by step, explain how to get M4A with the names you assigned to them in your device, and more.