iOS has a dedicated Voice Memo app. This app is great and coupled with the excellent hardware that an iPhone has, it makes for a good recording tool. On the surface of it, it seems that you can only record a voice memo in one go. If you want to add something to a memo after you’re done recording, there does’t seem to be a way to do that. That’s not the case, at least not on iOS 12. If you want, you can resume recording a voice memo on iOS even days after you’ve made it. Here’s how.
Open the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or iPad. Tap the voice memo that you want to continue recording. When you tap a voice memo, it expands to reveal a delete button, and a more options button. Tap the more options button and from the menu that opens, select Edit Recording.
This will open the memo for editing. On this screen, you can clip parts of the memo out, shorten it, change the name, and replace parts of it if you want. Since you can trim a voice memo, it stands to reason that you can play through it on the editing screen. What you need to do is drag your finger across the voice memo’s timeline and take it to the very end. Once you’re positioned at the very end, you will see that the Replace button is replaced with a Resume button.
Tap this button and you can continue recording a voice memo. When you’re done, the new audio that you recorded will be added to the end of the original one. It will be seamless and you won’t be able to tell where the addition was made.
When you sync voice memos to iTunes, or share the one you added more voice to, it will be shared as a single file. The new addition is appended to it much like a new page is added to an existing document.
You can do this with any number of voice memos on your phone. It doesn’t matter how old they are. The option to replace a part of the memo, or to add more to it will always be there. The size and the length of an edited memo will obviously change after you’ve made your edits but apart from that, it will be a seamless audio file.
