Need help understanding Facebook Messenger Interface

By Deborah Armstrong, 25 December, 2020

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

My friends are all sending me messages on Facebook messenger for Christmas and I cannot figure out how to record audio with this blasted program.

There is a button labeled "record audio" and there's a button labeled "record" both on the same screen. If I double-tap one or the other it records sometimes and sometimes not and there is never a stop button so I can't tell if it is recording. Sometimes a send button appears, but usually the message I end up sending just is a recording of voiceover after I've stopped talking and am looking for the stop button.

How do you record with this app?
And how do you listen to your recording before you send it? I get a send and a cancel button but I'm not clear what's in the recording until I actually send it; then I get a notice saying "you sent a five-second message" and I can tap on that and hear my attempts to locate a stop button.

There is also a field to type a message, and I can do that, but there's no "send" button. And because the keyboard then covers half the screen, I can't figure out how to dismiss it.

Options

Comments

By Dawn 👩🏻‍🦯 on Friday, December 25, 2020 - 16:43

You should see a record button. Get that. What you’ll find either before or after that is the amount of time that the recording is going on. It usually hits its limit at one minute. Because I was trying to record a message instead of dictating it because dictation was getting the best of me one day. And I had to record several messages. I can’t understand why the send button doesn’t appear for you all the time though. Because for me when I’ve used it, it’s appeared. Although I will say that I haven’t recorded an audio message since updating to the latest version. So they may have broken something. I don’t know them. I’m going to leave it up to other people on here to say whether or not that is the case.

By kool_turk on Friday, December 25, 2020 - 16:43

Ok, let's see if I can try and explain how this thing works, cause clearly they've changed things since I last used it, and that was 2 years ago!

I tested it on myself, yes, you can actually send messages to yourself by doing a search for your name.

Before, the record audio button could be held down, you would record your message, then release to send.

Now, the record button appears to be a toggle, so you double tap on that record button, keep swiping to the right until you find yet another button that says record.

That 0 you swiped over before finding that second record button is going to count up to let you know how long you've been recording for.

To record your message, double tap on that record button and speak your message.

Once you are done that record button you'll notice has turned into a send button, so just double tap on that and your message has been sent.

I'm experimenting as I'm typing this, so if this post seems a little disjointed it's because I'm still exploring the interface.

Good thing you can practice by messaging yourself, cause the alternative would be asking someone to practice on, which wouldn't be a bad thing if that person was in the same boat as you.

Oh and it looks like you can't play it back before sending, which kind of sucks.

Anyway, hopefully I managed to explain how it works.

Playing the message appears to be straight forward, just doubletap on the message to play or pause, no rewind or fastforwarding unfortunately, but messages, unless things have changed on facebook only go for about 60 seconds, so no talking for 15 minutes people!

I can't stand lengthy audio messages, but that's just me.