
Wechat audio bar mac os#
These instructions are mainly focused on my own setup: using Mac OS X, iOS 9 and iTunes 12. You have to at least be comfortable with the command line and a C compiler. Extracting and converting WeChat audio messagesīefore we get into the logistics of how this is done, I want to mention a few things about the instructions: Here, I’m presenting the steps, tools, and code that I used to convert them, in the hopes that they might be useful to other people in the future, as well as a description of the process I went through in trying to reverse-engineer their file format.

I didn’t let that stop me, though, and I managed to reverse-engineer the audio format that WeChat uses. Searching online gave little illumination as to which type of format they use either, and no usable instructions for converting them into a more mundane format like mp3. This gave me access to an SQLite file that contained all the text content of my chats, a folder that contained all the images from those chats, another that contained all the video files, and so on.Īudio messages, though, were another beast, as they were kept in an undocumented format with the unusual extension of “.aud”. The way I ended up doing it is by extracting WeChat’s data from my iPhone’s backup on my computer. So I found myself realizing that if I was going to do this, I needed to do it myself. The problem is, WeChat offers no opportunity for bulk exporting chat logs: the most you can do is email a small, hand-selected set of messages to yourself, and that only brings across text content. Recently, I found myself wanting to extract some WeChat messages from my chat logs for use in a personal project. It allows for much quicker messaging when you’re on the move. It was also far ahead of introducing features that are now standard in most chat apps: things like stickers, “share” messages from other apps, and audio messages were present in WeChat long before they made their way to services like Facebook Messenger.Īudio messages in particular are an interesting case: because Chinese text input is more complicated than English, many Chinese people just prefer pushing a button and speaking a short message to their friends than trying to type it out.

It’s a staple in China as much as Facebook is here, being used by pretty much everybody who has a smartphone.

WeChat (Chinese: 微信, wěi xìn) is a chat app popular in mainland China and used by many Chinese immigrants around the world.
Wechat audio bar how to#
Want to skip the chatter and just find out how to extract and convert WeChat audio messages? Click here to skip to the instructions.
