Collecting voice messages (audio guestbook)

Alongside written notes and video tributes, guests can leave a voice message in the guestbook — a short spoken keepsake recorded right from their phone. It's the same guestbook form described in "The guestbook" article; voice is simply one of the ways a guest can leave their message. Voice messages are included on the Signature and Premier plans.

To record, a guest taps the record button on the guestbook form. Their browser asks for microphone permission the first time — PixVenu only requests the mic at that moment, never before, so a guest who just wants to type or attach a photo is never prompted. Once recording, they see a live level meter and a countdown; recordings are capped at two minutes and stop automatically at the limit. When they finish, they can play the recording back to review it, re-record if they want another take, or delete it and start over before sending. Each guestbook entry carries one attachment, so a message is either a voice recording, a photo, or a video — plus the written note, which stays optional once a recording is attached. If a guest's phone or browser can't record, the form offers a file-upload fallback so they can still attach an audio file.

Recording happens entirely in the browser — there's no app to install and no account to create, exactly like the rest of PixVenu.

In the guestbook, a voice message appears as a play button with a small waveform and the clip's length. Nothing plays automatically; guests (and you) press play to listen. If you've set the guestbook to private, only you can play back what guests leave; on the public setting, other guests can listen as they scroll.

From your dashboard, voice messages fold into the same moderation queue as everything else. Each one shows its length up front so you know how long a clip runs before you play it, and if you've turned on content moderation, voice messages wait in a "pending" state for your approval just like photos and written notes — approve to publish, or hide to keep it out of the public view. You can also turn voice messages off for a gallery entirely: open the gallery's Settings, find Accept voice messages under Engagement, and switch it off. That hides the recorder from the guestbook form without touching written, photo, or video messages, and any voice messages already recorded keep playing.

When you download the full gallery archive at the end of the event, voice messages come with it: the audio files themselves are bundled into the ZIP alongside the photos, and both the guestbook CSV and text file list each recording's link and length — so the spoken messages are part of the same keepsake archive as the imagery.