Voice Memos visible on iTunes, but files appear to have been deleted on iPhone. Can I recover? As in title. I am trying to locate old voice memos of interviews from 2015. My backups have been destroyed and I have charged up the old 4S I used to record them, and -- lo and behold -- when I connect the phone to my Mac, iTunes lists the entire playlist of interviews that I need. But when I try to play them on iTunes nothing happens, I just get the little '!' icon appear next to the file.

The Voice Memos app says 'No recordings' -- the recordings aren't visible on the device.

So I have a tiny sliver of hope. A discrepancy between what the device tells me is on the device and what iTunes tells me is on the device.

Does this indicate that it may be possible to recover my Voice Memos?

I have used the tool iFunBox to browse my phone's Raw System Files and found a plist file in the Recordings folder that lists the old filenames. Perhaps this is how iTunes is getting the list. But how can I get the files? They are of interviews with my father, now deceased, and I am quite desperate to find them.
so sorry that this happened to you. Indeed, iTunes is probably listing the voice memos from the plist file - if you haven’t found the recordings themselves with iFunBox (.m4a files), they are probably lost unfortunately. You can have a look again in Media/Recordings and hunt for these if you haven’t already.

Sorry I can’t help more.