Handling Audio Interruptions During Recordings
What Wave does when a call, an alarm, or a disconnected headset takes the microphone mid-recording — and the one thing you should do afterwards.
Phone calls, alarms, Siri, and headsets that drop all take the microphone away from Wave. When that happens Wave detects it within a fraction of a second, tries to get the recorder back on its own, and keeps every second it captured before the interruption. In most cases you don't have to do anything except keep Wave open.
What an interruption looks like
The status on the recording screen changes to Interrupted and a banner appears at the top:
Recording interrupted — Trying to resume. Keep Wave open while audio recovers.
Wave then checks the recorder twice a second and retries the resume for you. When it works, the banner clears and a Recording Resumed card appears with the message "Wave recovered after an interruption. Review the final audio for gaps before you rely on it." The recording continues in the same session — you don't end up with two Waves.
One kind of interruption is never resumed automatically: when the phone's audio system restarts underneath the app. If the banner stays up, tap Resume on the recording screen yourself.
If Wave was in the background
On iPhone and Android, automatic resume only runs while Wave is on screen. If the interruption happens while Wave is in the background or your phone is locked, Wave sends you a notification:
- Recording Needs Attention — "Wave lost access to the recorder in the background. Reopen the app now to recover your recording."
- Recording Interrupted — "Wave stopped recording in the background. Reopen the app now so it can recover before audio is lost."
Tap it. About a second after Wave comes back on screen, it tries the resume automatically. The sooner you reopen the app, the less you miss — see Background Recording for how to keep interruptions from happening in the first place.
A recovered recording is not guaranteed to be gap-free. Whatever was said while the microphone was held by something else was never captured, and that's exactly what the "Review the final audio for gaps" message is warning you about. After any interrupted session, skim the transcript around the interruption before you rely on it.
Preventing interruptions
The most effective fix is Do Not Disturb before you start.
On iPhone, swipe down from the top-right corner and tap the crescent moon, or open Settings → Focus → Do Not Disturb (Apple's guide).
On Android, swipe down from the top of the screen and tap Do Not Disturb in your quick settings, or open Settings → Sound → Do Not Disturb (Google's guide).
Also worth doing before a long session:
- Turn off alarms and timers.
- Close music, podcast, and other recording apps.
- Charge your phone or plug it in. Wave keeps the screen awake while the recording screen is open, which uses more battery.
If the recording never recovers
Your audio is still on the device. Wave saves recordings locally as they happen and retries the upload on its own — see File Recovery for the automatic retries and the manual recovery screen.
FAQ
No. Everything recorded before the call is saved. Wave pauses while the system owns the microphone and resumes after — reopen Wave once the call ends if it was in the background.
It can't. iOS and Android give calls, alarms, and voice assistants priority over the microphone, and no app can override that. If you want the call itself recorded, use Recording Phone Calls with Wave instead.
No. Resuming continues the same session, and the transcript and summary are generated from the whole thing.
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