This iPhone setting ate up 7GB of my storage – it’s a one-click fix
This iPhone setting ate up 7GB of my storage – it’s a one-click fix
Publish Date: 2026-03-22 14:07:00
Source Domain: www.notebookcheck.net
I’d be shocked if any casual user was aware of this iPhone setting, but why would they? Voice Memos is supposed to be simple – press record and capture the thought. Even if you are a Grammy award winning artist like Charlie Puth who released a whole album named after the app (because he used it to record ideas). Or me.
For reasons unknown to anybody on planet Earth, Apple ships iPhones with the “Lossless” audio Voice Memos setting turned on.
Lossless vs Compressed Voice Memos – the file size difference is huge
Lossless audio preserves every bit of sound data, and it might be great if you are recording a live album in a studio with your iPhone. Which no one does.
On the built-in iPhone microphone(s), recorded in day-to-day environments and played back through the speaker or AirPods, the difference between Lossless and Compressed is simply unnoticeable. Yet the file sizes are significantly larger.
My quick test of recording a 1-minute Voice Memo using both settings shows that Lossless Voice Memos are approximately 3.5 times larger than Compressed Voice Memos. 500KB vs 1.7MB for a minute-long memo to be precise.
Now scale for the 1000+ Voice Memos I’ve recorded over the years. That’s easily 7GB of storage gone to waste in my case. For the videographers, that’s like recording TikTok videos in 8K RAW.
You recorded Voice Memos in Lossless quality? You can’t really get your storage back
The other frustrating moment is even if you realize years later that you’ve been recording in Lossless (hello!), there’s no “compress all” button.
You can export your Voice Memos to a computer, compress them (the irony) using something like Audacity, store them elsewhere, and delete the originals. But you can’t pop them back into your Voice Memos app. Android’s file system is much more powerful if you run into the same issue.
All in all, it’s technically impressive that the Lossless option exists on iPhone, but there’s no reason that setting…
