Editing an iPhone voice recording starts with deciding what you want to change—and protecting the version you might need later. A pause before a presentation, an interruption halfway through a memo, and an incorrect sentence call for different editing choices.
For this walkthrough, imagine a short narration introducing a workshop. It starts with silence, includes an unnecessary aside, and gives the wrong day. The aim is to produce a clear final recording while keeping the untouched take available for comparison.
The steps below follow Apple’s Voice Memos instructions for iOS 27. If your iPhone runs another version, menu labels or the editing layout may differ.
Duplicate the Recording Before Editing
In Voice Memos, select your recording, open the ellipsis menu, and choose Duplicate. Apple’s duplication instructions explain that the copy appears below the original. Tap its name to rename it.
Use descriptive names such as “Workshop — Original” and “Workshop — Edit 01.” Open the working copy before making changes.
Duplicating first is especially helpful when you are learning the controls or deciding between several versions. It gives you a reference you can return to without needing to remember every cut. For an interview or lecture, preserving that reference also helps you check whether a shortened passage still represents what the speaker meant.
Image Credit: AppleMagazine
Listen Before Choosing an Editing Tool
AppleMagazine’s guide to recording and transcribing audio on iPhone covers capturing spoken material. Once you have a recording, listen through it before deciding what to remove.
Our example narration reads:
“Welcome to the workshop. Let me start that sentence again. The session takes place on Thursday at ten. Please bring your notebook.”
Suppose the correct day is Friday. There are three separate jobs: shorten the silence around the narration, remove the unnecessary aside, and correct the schedule.
Write down those changes before touching the waveform. This simple checklist helps prevent a common editing mistake: concentrating on one awkward moment and overlooking an incorrect detail elsewhere.
Trim Unwanted Audio From the Ends
Select the working recording, open the ellipsis menu, and tap the trimming icon. Pinch outward to zoom in, then move the yellow handles around the audio you want to keep. Tap Play to preview the selection before choosing Trim, then tap Apply.
In our example, the useful selection begins just before “Welcome” and ends after “notebook.” Leave a little breathing room at both ends. Cutting exactly against the first or final sound can make a voiceover feel abrupt.
Listen for complete words rather than choosing boundaries solely by the waveform’s appearance. A quiet consonant may be harder to spot than a loud vowel, but losing it can make the opening sound clipped.
Image Credit: AppleMagazine
Delete an Interruption Within the Recording
In the same trimming view, position the yellow handles around the unwanted passage and choose Delete, then apply the change. Apple’s editing guide distinguishes this from trimming: deleting removes the selected passage; trimming keeps it.
For the workshop narration, select “Let me start that sentence again.” Listen across the resulting join, paying attention to the rhythm between the introduction and the schedule.
A shorter recording is not automatically a better recording. Keep natural pauses that help listeners follow the message. When editing someone else’s speech, check that removing a hesitation or aside does not change the meaning or make separate thoughts sound like one statement.
Replace an Incorrect Spoken Line
Open the ellipsis menu and choose Edit Recording. Move the playhead to the correction’s starting point, tap Replace, and speak. Tap Pause when finished and preview the result. Replacement records over existing audio from that position.
For our example, rehearse “The session takes place on Friday at ten” before recording it. Aim for a similar pace and keep the iPhone at a consistent distance from your mouth. A noticeably different room sound or speaking volume can make the correction more distracting than the original mistake.
Start playback a few seconds before the correction and continue beyond it. That makes changes in tone, background noise and sentence rhythm easier to notice than listening to the replacement alone. If the transition sounds unnatural, rerecording the full sentence may produce a cleaner result than replacing only the day.
Check the sentence afterward, too. Do not assume a replacement of a different length will leave the following words intact. If the correction sounds cramped, consider recording a longer continuous passage on another working copy.
Save and Check the Finished Version
When finishing an edit, tap Done. Choose Save Recording to update the working copy, or Save as New Recording to create a separate edited version while preserving the recording you opened. Because this walkthrough starts with a duplicate, the untouched original remains separate—as long as you have been editing the copy.
Listen to the finished narration from beginning to end. Confirm the correct day, complete opening and closing words, and comfortable transitions around each edit. Comparing it with the untouched take can reveal a missing phrase that is easy to overlook when replaying only a few seconds.
Before sharing, give the finished version a clear name and verify that you have selected it. Keeping an identifiable original alongside a checked final recording makes future corrections easier—and lets you edit with confidence rather than treating every cut as your only chance.
You’ve set up Focus modes for work and weekends, built Shortcuts for repetitive tasks, and rearranged your Home Screen until everything is perfect. But then your phone buzzes with another notification for a newsletter, shipping update, or sale. Meanwhile, the important email you need to follow up on is buried under everything else. You’ve put thought into how your devices work for you, but are you in charge of your email or is it in charge of you?
SaneBox brings that same attention to detail to your email. Its AI filtering sorts your messages with nothing to install, and since 2010, it has helped people separate the messages that need attention from the ones that can wait.
SaneBox’s SaneLater folder keeps messages that can wait in a dedicated folder, so you can focus on more important things. SaneNews collects newsletters in one place, ready for when you can take a break. And if the same unwanted sender keeps interrupting your day, move one of their messages to SaneBlackHole to keep their future messages out of your inbox.
There are tools for staying on top of ongoing conversations, too. SaneNoReplies collects conversations where you haven’t received a response, so you can follow up. When you need an answer before a deadline, SaneReminders can remind you to check back. You can snooze messages, too, putting something aside until you have time.
SaneBox works with the account and apps you already use. It sorts messages on your mail server, so its folders are available in Apple Mail, Outlook, or whatever other email app you use on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
SaneBox also learns from your email habits, and you can teach it your preferences. If a message belongs somewhere else, move it and SaneBox will use that folder going forward. Plus, the Daily Digest brings together unread messages in your SaneBox folders, so you can review everything when you’re ready to wrap up your day.
Privacy matters, too. SaneBox sorts using message headers, not the contents of your emails, and it doesn’t store full messages or attachments. Its security is reviewed every year as part of Google’s verification process, audited independently by Leviathan Security Group, and tested through HackerOne.
All of that adds up to less time managing email and more time for everything else, which is why more than 100,000 people rely on SaneBox and have given it a 4.9 rating across more than 1,000 reviews.
Nearly 100 years after the dirigible Graf Zeppelin made the first nonstop airship journey across the Pacific Ocean, another airship has successfully completed a round-trip flight from New Mexico to Japan and back. But the significance of this modern feat was less about the journey's length and more about its purpose: demonstrating how a lighter-than-air platform can act as a cell phone tower in the sky.
The trans-Pacific flight that took place over a month between August and September 2026 was the most notable milestone yet for Sceye, a US aerospace company based near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sceye has developed an uncrewed platform filled with helium for buoyancy and equipped with an electric-powered propeller for active propulsion, allowing it to resist most strong winds and keep hovering over the same location for long periods. The platform also uses top-mounted solar panels and onboard batteries to stay powered for stratospheric operations around the clock.
“We can stay over an area of operation, and we do that in the stratosphere right around 60,000 feet, so we're twice as high as air traffic and we're above the jet stream, and yet 30 times closer than low-Earth orbit satellites,” Mikkel Frandsen, founder and CEO of Sceye, told Ars. “We can fly through day and night until the sun comes up the next morning and recharges the batteries, at which point we're still at the same altitude and still over the same area of operation.”
Russian drones are suspected of sinking a cargo ship and leaving chemical tankers ablaze near the Black Sea coasts of Bulgaria and Romania, respectively. The latest attacks mean that at least seven ships have been attacked in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries—and even within Romania's territorial waters if Russian involvement is confirmed in the case of the chemical tankers.
Such attacks have spurred requests for NATO to redeploy counter-drone systems to provide more protection. In a social media post on October 15, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated that NATO had increased "counter-drone capabilities" along the alliance's eastern flank after meeting with the leaders of Bulgaria and Romania.
The latest attacks this week occurred within 24 hours between October 14 and October 15, when the two chemical tankers were set afire after Russian drones were detected in Romanian airspace, according to Deutsche Welle. Both ships were sitting at anchor near the mouth of the Sulina canal that connects the Black Sea to the Danube River, which has become a crucial shipping export route for Ukraine, Reuters reported.
Despite the expansion of Starlink and other communications satellite services, most of the world’s Internet traffic still travels through subsea cables crisscrossing the ocean floors. Those fiber-optic cables coexist with a network of oil and gas pipelines and submarine power cables—and all these crucial links connecting countries and continents now face growing sabotage risks as gray-zone warfare and open conflicts have become widespread.
The rising risks to the world’s invisible infrastructure beneath the waves are the main subject of a new book by Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who leads the Threats to the Global Maritime Order Initiative. Her book, titled Undersea War, explores the modern rise in suspicious incidents in which ships dragging their anchors for unusually long periods have cut or damaged undersea cables and pipelines, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.
Braw acknowledges that about 60 percent of undersea cable damage is primarily due to human error during fishing and shipping activities, when weighted nets or anchors drag across the seabed. Natural hazards like storms and undersea landslides also account for a smaller proportion of such incidents. In total, between 150 and 200 cables are damaged each year and usually repaired quickly.
Getting your whole family up and pointed in the right direction every morning isn’t simple. Everyone’s on a different schedule, and schedules change day to day. It’s a mess that’s solvable with the help of Crickets, the first alarm built for the realities of everyday family life.
Crickets lets everyone in your family see the alarms others choose to share and, with permission, change them. So instead of asking everyone when they need to be up the next day, you already know. If you’re the first one up, that’s a superpower. Whether it’s a flight that got delayed in the dead of night or a 5:00 AM message from your kids’ school about a schedule change, you can adjust alarms without waking a soul. And it works both ways: when a practice is canceled or a trip departs later, anyone you’ve granted edit access can push your alarm back while you sleep in.
Crickets even gives you tomorrow’s weather as you head off to bed. That way, you’ll know things like whether you should get up a little early to deal with the snow that’s forecast overnight.
Everyone in your circle is right there on your Home Screen and Lock Screen, too. Plus, with widget and Live Activities support, you can keep track of who’s already awake and who’s been hitting the snooze button. You’ll see your morning coming together without even opening the app.
Each person in your circle stays in control. They decide which alarms to share and which to keep private, and they can grant or revoke editing access whenever they want. People can belong to more than one circle without those circles merging, too. That way, parents can be in a circle with their kids, but their kids’ friends circle remains theirs alone.
A single subscription covers every member of your Apple Family Sharing group, allowing you to coordinate everyone’s alarms at once, while keeping each person’s sharing choices their own.
For a closer look at Crickets and a more coordinated start to the day, visit cricketsalarm.app. And, for a limited time, MacStories readers and AppStories listeners can get 50% off for six months with code MACSTORIES2026. Select Redeem on the paywall and enter the code.
Our thanks to Crickets for their support of MacStories this week.
It happens to all of us. You come across an article you want to read, but you’re in the middle of something and don’t have the time. GoodLinks gives those articles a home on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with a clean, customizable reading experience when you’re ready to return to them.
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GoodLinks also lets you highlight your favorite passages of articles, export your highlights as Markdown, and add notes to your highlights. Plus, GoodLinks has extensive Shortcuts support, allowing you to use what you save with your other apps and workflows, and a local API on the Mac to script your links, tags, and highlights.
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Et si l’IA ne se contentait plus d’aider les scientifiques, mais commençait à faire de la recherche à leur place ? Anthropic affirme que Claude a identifié un système enzymatique inédit dans l’ADN de bactériophages. Une découverte encore à confirmer, mais qui révèle surtout une ambition plus...
Apple is working on an AI server that would use Apple’s high-performance M-series Ultra chips found in Mac desktops. The potential product’s expected release in 2029 would mark the first Apple server to hit the market in nearly two decades—and could capitalize on the surging popularity of Apple hardware among AI developers.
The enterprise server would come in two configurations that include either two or four of Apple’s future M8 Ultra chips, according to The Information. The project reportedly received support from new Apple CEO John Ternus when it began a year ago, back when Ternus led Apple’s hardware engineering efforts.
This revelation coincides with booming sales for Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio as AI developers and companies snap up the Mac computers to run AI workloads. The popularity of such computing devices that rely on Apple’s M-series Ultra chips has undoubtedly encouraged Apple’s pursuit of an enterprise server using the same chips.
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