If you have spent years in Ancestry, FamilySearch, Gramps, or Family Tree Maker, your tree almost certainly exports as a GEDCOM file. And if you have also collected recordings — interviews, voicemails, digitised tapes — the obvious question is whether they come along for the ride.
The short answer is no, and it is worth understanding why, because it changes how you plan the move.
GEDCOM Is a Text Format, Not a Container
A GEDCOM file is plain text. Open one and you will see individuals, families, names, birth and death events, places, and the links between people. It is a genuinely useful standard and the reason you are not locked into any one genealogy product.
What it does not do is hold your media. The standard has a multimedia record that can point at a file — a path or a filename — but the audio itself stays outside the GEDCOM. So when you export, you typically get one of three things: a bare .ged file with no media references at all, a .ged with file paths that only made sense on the machine that wrote it, or a zip archive with a media folder beside the .ged.
Even in the best case, those pointers are brittle. Paths break, filenames get mangled by different operating systems, and different programs disagree about how to write the records in the first place. Any tool that promised to reliably reassemble your audio from a GEDCOM alone would be overpromising.
“GEDCOM carries the skeleton of a family. The voices are the part you have to carry yourself.”
What a Heard Again Import Actually Does
In Heard Again, GEDCOM import is one tab in the Import Wizard. You upload the .ged file, and the import runs as a background job you can watch — it is not a hold-your-breath page refresh. It reads the individuals and families, creates or updates the matching people in your familyspace, and preserves the relationships between them. Place names found in the file are geocoded afterwards, so events land on a map rather than staying as free text.
Two details matter if you are importing into a tree that already exists. First, you can optionally link the imported records to a person you already have — useful when you are grafting a branch onto an existing tree rather than starting from scratch. Second, you can turn on deduplication, which compares the incoming people against your current records and produces a merge proposal rather than silently combining anyone. You review the matches, with a confidence score on each, and decide. Nothing in your existing tree is overwritten because a name happened to look similar.
The import job reports what it did — how many individuals and families were parsed, how many records were created or updated — so you can sanity-check the result instead of guessing.
Getting the Audio In: The Order That Works
Because audio travels separately, the reliable approach is to import the tree first and the recordings second. The tree gives you the people to attach things to.
Step one: rename the files before you upload anything. This is the step people skip and regret. Do it while your old program is still open in front of you and you can still tell which recording is which. A name like mary-okeefe-1931-emigration-interview-2019.mp3 survives any migration. Recording_0412.m4a survives nothing. If you have more than a handful of files, batch-rename them in a spreadsheet first.
Step two: import the GEDCOM. Let the job finish and spot-check a few people you know well, especially anyone with an unusual name, a remarriage, or an adoption. Those are where GEDCOM exports most often go odd.
Step three: bulk-upload the audio. The Import Wizard has a separate Bulk Audio tab that takes many files at once, so you are not uploading a hundred recordings one at a time. They land as assets in your familyspace, ready to be attached.
Step four: attach each recording to its person and write the context down. Who is speaking, roughly when it was recorded, and one line about what it is. This is the only manual part of the process and it is also the part that gives the archive its value. A file attached to a named person with a sentence of context is a memory. The same file loose in a folder is a maintenance problem for whoever comes after you.
If you are also moving photos and documents at the same time, the broader checklist in how to preserve family memories digitally covers naming, formats, and keeping redundant copies, and it applies to this migration almost line for line.
A Tree Full of Names and No Voices
Here is what usually happens when someone finishes an import. They look at a tree with four hundred people in it, and audio attached to two of them. That is not a failure of the import. It is the honest state of most family archives: decades of careful research into names and dates, and almost no recordings of the people who are still here to be recorded.
Treat the gap as a to-do list. Every living person on that tree is a recording you could still make this month. The guide to recording your grandparents has the questions that work and how to ask without making it awkward, and why family voices are worth preserving at all is the case for doing it before the calendar decides for you. Research can be done later by anyone. A voice can only be recorded by someone who is in the room.
Doing This Without Standing Up a Server
You can run Heard Again yourself — it is open source, and a GEDCOM import plus a pile of audio files runs fine on modest hardware. If that is your preference, do it. The caveat is that voice generation is the part that wants a real GPU, so the hardware question splits depending on whether you only want the archive or the voice features too. We laid out both tiers and what each one actually costs if you want to price it before committing.
The plain reason to pay instead: an import like this is the moment your archive goes from scattered to consolidated, and that is exactly when you want backups you did not have to configure. The plan you can actually start today is $9.99 a month: storage, sharing, consent controls, managed backups and updates, the family sharing that makes other relatives able to add their own recordings instead of emailing them to you, and thirty minutes of voice generation a month if you later want it. There is a cheaper $4.99 storage-and-sharing tier listed with no generation minutes, which would suit a pure import-and-archive job, but it is not open for signup yet — we would rather tell you that here than let you find out at the checkout. You can see what each plan includes on the pricing page. Either way the software is the same — paying buys you someone else doing the operations.