Voice Memos not uploading location/time/data

Bug Reports
1

A couple of years ago, I finally figured out how to Air-Drop my bird recordings from my iPhone Voice Memos to my Macbook Downloads folder, then upload them to iNat, and the date/time/location, all automatically filled in.

It’s been a few months since I’d done this, I replaced my old Macbook Air 13" with a brand new Macbook Air M1 last month, and today, I Air-Dropped a few Voice Memos of bird audio to my Macbook Downloads Folder, then uploaded these to iNat, but woops, no date, no time, no location!

Location = ON
Voice Memos = While Using the App + Precise Location

on the apple help site, there was a suggestion I tried to no avail.
Settings>General>Reset>Locations privacy

I initially only noticed only the absence of location, so thought it was a phone location thing, which led me to Reset Location Privacy, but with date & time also not populating, I think it’s an iNat website problem?

I also tried “upload” and “drag and drop” method.
Photos air-dropped from my iphone to my Macbook downloads folder don’t have this problem, only the audio files from iphone Voice Memos

No matter which way I try, a teensy sentence appears below audio “loading metadata” , but date/time/location remain empty

Platform
from my iPhone iOS 17.3.1
to my Macbook Air M1, 2020

Browser
Firefox 123.0

Screenshot 2024-02-24 at 23.11.54
Screenshot 2024-02-24 at 23.11.541198×1260 67 KB

2

can you actually see that the iPhone voice memo files on your M1 machine contain location information?

3

Like mentioned before, I am not sure if the memos contain the metadata, I will try to replicate this on my iPhone with my Laptop real quick and then come back!

Observation: The .m4a files which are produced by the Voice Memo app does not store the Location in its metadata, reason for your Phone asking for said permission might be because it still stores the Location where it was made, just not in the metadata of the file directly, the Date might also be stored somewhere “unusual” even tho I believe it to be stored in the default register for the parameter of the “Last modified at” time.

4

when I do “info” on a photo, I get date/time and I can see the map
when I’ve previously air-dropped Voice Memos from my iphone to my macBook, as long as the file wasn’t trimmed, the metadata stayed, but once I trim the noisy ends off, the newly in QuickTime, the newly saved file looses all info, so as long as I was dealing with the original I was ok,
but now, as indicated in attachment, not only no location, but also no Date/time, from an original air-dropped file.
I also replicated this solely on my iphone, using the iNat on the browser, and uploading a voice memo directly on the phone, again, no date/time/location

Something has changed and I don’t know what, and I don’t know what date.

It seems ridiculous that I’m using “precise location” for Voice Memos and that some people use these locations for Memo naming (I don’t, I keep numbered sequential, and animal-rename-manually) but it’s no longer in metadata (or never has been??? I sure I had such metadata in recent years, because I remember having to modify a location audio source to “where my feet are” to a perceived “where the audio is coming from”.
Maybe I’m just losing my mind, but this is not no longer just location, but also date/time. So it’s not just my mind!

5

So you are saying that NOW, when you upload a voice memo audio to iNat, you not only get no location, but also no date/time field auto-fill??

6

I am not familiar with how it was beforehand, I suppose before the DateTime was autofilled and now it isn’t? Well yes, thats an active bug in the app! Worth being checked out by developers!

1 Like
7

we’re not talking about photos. we’re talking about your sound files. do you actually see location information if you look at the details of the sound files on your M1 machine?

i’ve never seen any sound files that have location and date/time recorded metadata on them, and i’d be surprised if iNaturalist ever handled such metadata for sound files.

(the kinds of metadata that usually get stored in sound files would be things like artist, genre, title, year, etc.)

maybe if you recorded a sound in the iNat app itself, it would record a location and a date/time in the observation, but, again, i’d be surprised if that metadata would end up saved in the audio file itself.

8

There are TWO issues here. Date/time AND geolocation

Date/time of Voice Memos on my Macbook aren’t populating either!

As for geolocation…
Well because I hadn’t done this in a while, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly by recollection. I had in the past used both methods, recordings with iNat app, and recordings in Voice Memos. The advantage of Voice Memos is you can trim start and end to get rid of all the noise. (similar design fail with iNat pics which can’t be zoomed or cropped) so I very rarely use iNat to capture content because it results in horribly long and noisy audio.

I just felt certain that in previous times, my voice memo uploads had geolocation. I guess I could have dreamt it. :(
But it is weird that Voice Memos can be “auto-named” according to geolocation but that geolocation doesn’t exist in Voice Memos?? I find that contradictory :)

9

Abastrax, I tried again today, both phone and macbook have had updates, still no populating of Date/Time

have you tried uploading a Voice Memo to see if you have Date/Time auto-populating?

10

Well, only two people have looked at this dual issue of Date/Time not populating Voice Memo uploads on MacbookAir M1 and geolocation. I guess I’m willing to accept I just dreamed the geolocation for these years, but Date/Time not auto-populating???

Since this is the Bug Report, I’m assuming Abastrax and Pisum are iNat techs?

11

No, if someone is on iNaturalist staff it will say “iNaturalist Staff” next to their username here.

1 Like
12

it’s the same thing. look at the metadata in the actual sound file on your machine, and see if you find either location information or date recorded. (we’re not talking about the file creation date or the update date. we’re talking about a recording date, which is the date the sound was actually recorded, not the date when the file was created or updated.)