Saturday, January 30, 2016

MyHeritage Adds Audio Recordings to Their Mobile App

I received the MyHeritage email this afternoon about the audio recordings on the MyHeritage mobile apps - you can read all about them at New: Audio Recordings for Interviewing Your Relatives on the MyHeritage Blog.

The email from MyHeritage said:

"As we know, oral interviews are vital in family history research. Our relatives are a treasure trove of precious family information, and we want to make sure that their stories are preserved forever. Audio Recordings lets you interview your relatives directly from their profile in your family tree, and store the interview for future generations in your MyHeritage family site.
"Audio files are uploaded to the family tree profile of the person you're interviewing, where they can easily be listened to at anytime.

"Audio Recordings is free and available on the latest version of the MyHeritage mobile app on the App Store and Google Play.

"I'd be grateful if you could share the link for your readers to download the app: https://www.myheritage.com/mobile"

I like to try out new things - so this is what I did:

1)  I opened the MyHeritage mobile app on my iPhone and found my grandmother in the family tree:


2)  I tapped on her icon on the screen above and her profile opened:


3)  There is a headphones icon to the right of her name.  When I tap on the icon, the Recording screen opens:


It says I don't have any recordings yet.

4)  To make a recording, I tapped on the orange "Start recording" button on the screen above.  I did, and the orange screen below opened:


To make the recording, I tapped on the "Record" button at the bottom of the screen above.

5)  I recorded a short story about my grandmother coming to San Diego twice - once for her son's wedding in 1942 and the second time in 1959 to visit our family and meet her three California grandsons.

When I was done, I tapped the "Stop" button at the bottom of the recording screen.

6)  The screen then told me that the recording had ended successfully:


I tapped on the "OK" button to save the recording.

7)  The screen changed to the one below:


8)  I went to Edit the name of the recording, so I followed directions in the MyHeritage blog post, and swiped to the left to Edit the recording:


9)  I tapped on the "Edit" button and entered my recording title into the Edit form and tapped OK:


10)  When I tapped the "OK" button, the screen showed that the recording name had been changed:


11)  Well, that was really easy to do!  

I learned that I am really terrible at telling stories about my family - I need to have bullet points to do this well.  Maybe I can read some of my blog posts?  That would probably be too boring!

12)  I am not sure who can hear my recordings.  I tried to find the profile in the MyHeritage blog post but that profile doesn't exist, apparently.

My guess is that anybody who can access my MyHeritage tree can hear them; there are 30 MyHeritage members who can access my tree.  Would someone try to listen to my recording for my grandmother on MyHeritage and see if you can hear it?

UPDATED:  Once again MyHeritage advances their state of family tree technology!  FamilySearch already has this audio feature in their Family Tree mobile app. My guess is that Ancestry.com and  Findmypast will add this feature in the near future since it seems so easy to do.

Back to the regularly scheduled programming!

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Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello, sir! Fabulous article and great news shared which I'm learning is regular for you! ;-) I surfed over after your blog was mentioned on the RootsMagic Facebook group as a way to learn more about using RM. I'm a new purchaser of RM born out of the FTM transition - not that I had FTM, but the timing was right for this very new genie to be to make some decisions about how to start building my trees and info. So I HAVE RM - but honestly haven't begun adding items into it as my timing turned lousy - but will return. I'd LIKE to read the book and get at least a BIT of info about RM before I just plow into it with "I'll figure it out as I go." So your blog info has been helpful - occasionally over my head on RM for now, but that won't always be the case - but you MOSTLY seem to have a great sense of humor and fun approach to this "hobby" with a lot of great tips and info along the way. THANKS for taking the time to share your process and finds along the way! LOVED learning about the audio option as I'll be traveling to PA over the summer to connect w/ relatives - some quite elderly - now I need to consider whether I need to do trees on MyHeritage ALSO! (NOT sure about having trees in multiple places to keep track of as I barely have time to focus on one site for that!) Thanks for doing what you do and sharing it! It IS appreciated!

David Adams said...

Randy, FamilySearch already allows for audio files, up to 15 MB in size. Two formats are supported. Caution: I have heard of at least one-two cases where someone apparently recorded an interview on a phone, and "sent" it to FamilySearch > Memories > Audio. Apparently, they managed to send a "link" to the interview rather than the interview file, so when they deleted the interview from their phone, it disappeared.

Randy Seaver said...

David, thank you for reminding me of the FamilySearch audio feature on the Family Tree app. I had forgotten.

I edited and updated my post to reflect that. Thanks again!