Audacity Forum

Hello,

I am trying to record my recently deceased husband's voicemail greeting on Audacity, for sentimental reasons. He has an iPhone 4. I'm functionally illiterate about any kind of recording "equipment" I need to do this. In Audacity, I tried recording the greeting through a Vansonic headset I use for Dragon dictation into the computer, but it was unsuccessful. I had plugged the microphone plug from the headset into my HP 4530s (Windows 7 OS) laptop microphone access plug, which of course worked when I made a test recording of my voice using Audacity. So I activated the voicemail greeting on the phone while holding the headset recording mike next to the iPhone's speaker as the voicemail greeting was going, but it only recorded blipping sounds with the greeting playing very low in the background. I'm sure my fledgling attempts are quite laughable, as I do not understand electronics at all. If there is a way to record his greeting directly through the phone, I would so appreciate those directions. Or ANY suggestions of how to do this before I clear his phone and sell it--I'll purchase equipment if I need to. Thank you for any help you can provide, even if it's a "You cannot do this sort of thing" response.

Sorry--I forgot to include that I am using Audacity 2.0.0 to try to record my husband's voicemail greeting. Thanks.

Were you still choosing the microphone input in Audacity's Device Toolbar when you tried before with the headset microphone?

If so and the quality was not good enough, you have two choices.

One is to play the message on the iPhone and record it into Audacity. You will need a suitable cable to connect between
the headphone output of the iPhone and the mic input of the HP computer. If the HP has a line-in input separate from the mic input, try the line-in first. Set Audacity to record from line-in if that is how you connect to the computer.

Or you can transfer voicemail messages to your computer using a USB cable. Either drag the messages into the computer using Windows Explorer or sync the entire iPhone to your computer which will do the same thing. If you transfer the messages with a cable they will be in AMR format, but you may need a special program to do the job of saving them with AMR extension when you transfer, or else you may have to add or change to the AMR extension yourself. This means that if the file was called just "voicemail" or "voicemail.bin", you have to change its name to "voicemail.amr".

See these Google search results for more help http://tinyurl.com/cbf6bnx .

One the voicemail files are transferred to your computer, Audacity can import them for editing if you add the optional FFmpeg library to your computer:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/help/man ... tml#ffdown .


Gale