Uploading iOS Voice Memos into iTunes Match

Last night, I listened to friends perform at a jazz jam. Their music was phenomenal. I enjoyed it so much that I recorded most of the jam session. When I got home, I discovered that moving a voice memo into iTunes Match (iCloud) was a small challenge requiring a little trial an error.

The problem with moving an iOS voice memo into iTunes Match is iTunes considers voice memos "ineligible" for the iTunes Match service. That means there wasn't a simple way for me to get my jazz recording into a playlist that could be shared across my computers and iOS devices.

I reread my 2007 blog post about legally converting iTunes Store purchases into MP3s and that gave me an idea. Since iTunes won't sync voice memos across devices, I converted it to an AAC format which solved my problem. I'm not sure exactly what happens during the conversion process, since the pre and post converted files are both AAC, but twice the size. Perhaps it simply took the mono recording and doubled it into a stereo file. Regardless, it worked and the newly converted file successfully uploaded into iTunes Match.

The conversion process is easy. In iTunes, simply right-click (control-click) on the voice memo and select "Create AAC Version." Once you've converted the voice memo, you can choose "Update iTunes Match" from the Store pull-down menu to put it into the cloud. That's it.