What I Found Out Today: If you’re like me, then you have a healthy obsession with Jeremy Lin. On top of that, you’ve saved many of your funny voicemails.
Like me, you tire of having to re-save all your funny voicemails every 30 days or so. It only takes 3 minutes to re-save them all, but it’s annoying. If you’re anything like me, you don’t like being annoyed. I’m so glad we get along.
If you’re like me, you have Verizon. And sometime in the last couple years, Big Red disabled the ability for you to save your voicemails (via visual voicemail) as MP3s. Instead, they now recommend a third party company to get copies of your voicemail. Well, fuck that.
Being like me, you don’t want to pay $40 to save 10 voicemail messages. In fact, it would pain you immensely to dole out that money just so you can have your own voicemails. I feel your pain.
Record Voicemails / Save them as mp3s
As my doppelganger, you pride yourself on your resourcefulness; so you search the internet for other ways to archve your voicemails onto your computer.
You tried playing the voicemails on the speakerphone and recording with another phone (not bad), you tried connecting your phone via AUX cable and using the PC’s sound recorder (didn’t work), and then you tried recording your voicemails by playing them through your jambox (terrible).
I (we) finally came across a method that worked out well – recording your VMs via VOIP; playing your voicemail over Skype (or similar) and recording the audio with a recording program. Here’s how we did it:
1) Download and Install VOIP Program – the most popular VOIP service is Skype, but there are others like Vonage and Callcentric. With Skype you’ll have to purchase a $10 credit (at 2.3c a minute). As annoying as Skype can be, I already had that on my computer.
2) Download a Recording Program – Skype won’t let you natively record you phone calls, so you’ll have to find a recording software that will do that. I went with Pamela (free for 30 days, 15 minute time limit) and she worked out fine for this purpose.
3) Call Your Voicemail – Dial your phone number via Skype. Let it go to your voicemail. Press “#” when you hear your message. Enter your pin and “#”. During this step, the Pamela software pop-up will display, requesting to record the call. You’ll have 10 seconds to press “Yes”.
You. Are. Now. Recording. Your. Voicemails.
Once you’re finished, Pamela will spit out your voicemail recordings into an MP3.
4) Find Your MP3 – When you’re finished, open Pamela up, right click on your recording file and select “open recording folder”. This will open up the folder where your voicemail MP3 is.
5) Replay Your Recording – Make sure everything sounds good. If it is, you’ve got MP3s of your voicemails!
The audio quality is really good considering. I am really happy with this solution. In any case, I suspect this would be the quality I would receive from any third party vendor. And this method should work with other carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint.
Tip: To save you time, if you have less than 15 minutes of voicemails, copy all your voicemails into one large, continuous file and use a program like MP3cut to slice them up. That’s what I did, so you know it’ll work for you, being like me, as you are.
If you found this useful, then puleeze share….
