Recording voicemails from my smart phone

I am trying to record my voicemails from my Samsung s4mini to my computer. I have windows 7 and I just downloaded the lasted version of Audacity. I have no idea at the moment if it is .exe or zip.
I went looking for how to do this and Cnet had an ariticle–granted it was written in 2012–that told me to get an auxiliary cable and then download this program. Launch it>edit>preferences>recording. Check software playthrough. Plug cable from jack ofphone into computers mic jack.
Hit record, then call my vm put in my pin and let it play the messages back while it is recording on Audacity. When done, hit stop. I can then edit it if I want.
Then go to file>export and save the audio file in your preferred file type. Which I tried MP3.
I could not hear while it was recording, I don’t even know if it got recorded. I tried to play back whatever I had and got no sound.
So, none of this worked. I have gone through the tutorials and looked in the forum and been trying to get this to work for the last 2 hours.
I need these voicemails on my computer and am really frustrated.
What am I missing?
Thank you

Audacity behaves in clear, predictable ways when it’s making a successful recording. The red sound meters bounce and blue waves will accumulate on the timeline.

If you don’t get either one, then Audacity wasn’t working correctly, or you didn’t put any sound in for it to record.

Most cellphones don’t have a headphone connection, but they do have a headSET connection, headphones plus a microphone. When you got your cable, did they say it was to be used for what you wanted to do?

Koz

Everybody knows what an MP3 is and you have to use it all the time. They’re wrong. It’s difficult to edit an MP3 into another MP3 without losing sound quality, sometimes seriously so. MP3 is the end of the line.

Export a WAV of your work and use that as the archive master. Make a copy on a thumb drive and save it in a safe place.

WAV does have size restrictions. CD quality stereo runs about 300MB per hour. If you transfer the work mono instead of stereo, you can get two hours into 300MB. WAV format poops out at 2000MB.

Koz

I think you mean 600 MB per hour. FLAC is about 300 MB per hour for stereo.

Gale