How to Record Audio with your IPhone

Voice Memo App - FREE

A quick word about audio codecs: The iPhone’s Voice Memo app uses the MPEG-4 codec to record and playback audio files — and compresses these files using the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) codec or the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). You want the Lossless codec, to ensure the highest possible quality.

To get the highest quality audio with Voice Memo: 

  • Go to Settings > Voice Memos > Audio Quality and select LOSSLESS

  • Open your Voice Memo App
Press the big red Record button to start your audio recording

When you are finished recording, select the three ellipses “...”

button to open up the menu options for this audio file:

And select “Share” to send the audio file to your computer via AirDrop or to your email inbox.

The resulting file should have a file extension of “.M4A”

When you open the file in Premiere, you will see that the

file was recorded as Mono, with a sample rate of 44.1kHz.



How to Record Audio with your Android

Easy Voice Recorder - FREE

There are several good free apps on the Google Play store for audio recording, and we recommend “Easy Voice Recorder”. First, download the app.

Open Easy Voice Recorder

Click the hamburger menu in the top right corner of the screen

Select “Settings”

Change Sound Quality to “High”

In the Tuning Menu, make sure the Format is “.WAV”

And change the Sample Rate to 48kHz

Go back to the main settings menu. Under Advanced & Troubleshooting, make sure

“Compress PCM files when sharing” toggle is switched OFF

Now you are ready to start recording audio files!


Just hit the red microphone button when you are ready to start.

When you are done recording, you can find your audio list in the “Listen” tab.

Here you can also share your audio file with a nearby device or via email.

The resulting file should have a file extension of “.WAV”

When you open the file in Premiere, you will see that the file

was recorded as Mono, with a sample rate of 48kHz and a Bit Depth of 16.

Upgrading your Phone Mic

For an improvement in audio recording quality (and a higher sampling rate than the 8 kHz of the built-in iPhone mic), you could purchase an external mic for your phone:


Each of these mics come with software for your phone, allowing you to record WAV files (instead of M4A files) at a 48kHz sampling rate, and control the microphone sensitivity.