Please Help- Trying to record cell phone messages

[adh0621]

I am trying to record some cell phone messages to my PC. I have a cord that plugs from my cell phone headset into my PC mic outlet. I have Audacity, but I have two problems 1. the sound is coming out terribly, and 2. Every time I hit STOP to move to the next message, it creates a second row of sound and when I replay it, all the sound tracks play at once.

Is there any easy way for a non-sound pro to save voicemails? I'm at my wits end. Please help!

[bgravato]

If you want to record it all in the same track you can hit pause instead of stop.

About the quality issue, it depends on what kind of signal the phone is sending out... where do you connect the cable to on the phone? Is that something like a headphone/headset output? It might not be suitable for the mic input on your computer... Does your computer have a line in? That would be a blue socket in a desktop computer. Most laptops don't have one unfortunately...

[kozikowski]

The first immediate problem is plugging your cellphone into your Windows® Laptop computer. Did I hit it? The connection from the cellphone is the "headphone or earpiece" signal, and likely to be powerful and closer to Line-Level and not Microphone Level. Briefly, you can't plug that into the Mic-In of your computer. You might be able to find Windows instructions that switch your one connection between Stereo Line-In and Mic-in, some computers have that. Many don't. Some computers have a blue Stereo Line-In in addition to the pink Mic-In. Use the blue one.

What's probably going to happen is you need an adapter device like a UCA-202.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/UCA202.jpg

Next problem is recording your messages as one continuous sweep and not piled on top of each other.

-- You can listen to your existing messages with the Solo (by itself) and Mute (shut up) buttons to the left of each track.

--You can Pause Recording while you select the next message.

-- Audacity 1.3.13 has the ability to Append Recording. Full Stop and then pick up again where you left off.

If you're not in Audcity 1.3, you should be.

Audacity 1.2 is very old and no longer supported,
patched, corrected, or updated. Audacity 1.2 can
be unstable on newer computers.

Download and install the latest Audacity 1.3 from here...

http://audacityteam.org/download/

You can install both audacity 1.2 and Audacity 1.3 on
the same computer, but only use one at a time.

Audacity 1.2 will not open projects made on Audacity 1.3.

If you use MP3 or some of the more modern audio
compression formats, get Lame and FFMpeg software
from the same web site. Do not use older software
or software from other web sites, even though they
may have the same names.

Koz

[adh0621]

Thank you so much for the detailed response.

When I had tried this previously, it seemed to work better. Then in playing around with tracks, I changed settings and made it hopeless. When I record, only one side of the red/green bar activates. I tried to install the old version to see if it woudl go back to the original settings but it didnt.

The phone is a droid so yes, my output is the mic. There is only a mic input to my laptop. I dont have a desktop.

Should I set it as Line in? Or Mic? Or any tips on how to adjust the settings to get less of the feedback? It actually sounds better recording via Microsoft sound recorder but that limits me to one minute and some of the messages exceed that.

Thanks again!