MP3 my voicemails

November 9, 2005 1:51 PM

I want to turn my voicemails into MP3s

my phone is a Treo600, my cell carrier is Rogers. my home phone has Telus. My home computer is a windows XP Pro. Help me download my voicemails {Rogers, Telus} into my computer for posterity.

posted by seawallrunner to Technology (10 answers total)

I am not to sure how to actually download them... but what I had to do for someone else was buy a recording device (looked like a little scution cup with a headphone style jack at the other end) and hooked one end to the phone where the sound comes out of, and the other end to my computers microphone jack. I then used windows sound recorder to record the sound coming from the phone, and saved it as a stereo quality .wav file. I then used Nero to encode it to an mp3.

Kind of a pain, but it got the job done.
posted by deadmouse at 2:04 PM on November 9, 2005

get a VoIP carrier such as Vonage, which does the .wav part for you by sending an email, then follow the encoding procedure to make it mp3.
posted by terrier319 at 2:26 PM on November 9, 2005

Response by poster: thanks deadmouse and terrier319 for your suggestions, but what can I do with what I already have?

Vonage/VOIP is definitely on my list of upcoming purchases.
posted by seawallrunner at 4:26 PM on November 9, 2005

Plug a mic to the computer, play the voice recordings over the phone, while at the same time, hold the mic up to the ear piece of the phone and record with the "sound recorder" application that is included in XP. Worked for me when i had to record some messages from my answering machine. Hope this helps.
posted by Maishe at 4:58 PM on November 9, 2005

I wonder if a 1/8" Mono Jack to
Submini Mono Phone Plug would get you right from the earpiece-out on the phone to the audio-in on the sound card, with the addition of a male-male 1/8" wire. Most of the above strategies should suffice, though, since VM quality isn't the best to begin with.
posted by VulcanMike at 6:13 PM on November 9, 2005

I used an adaptor (from a 2.5mm to a 3.5mm, like this) from the hands-free jack on my mobile phone (cell phone for USians) straight into the line-in or mic input on my sound card. Hilarity ensues.
posted by bdave at 6:23 PM on November 9, 2005

Er, or what VulcanMike said, kinda.
posted by bdave at 6:24 PM on November 9, 2005

Get a Telephony Modem that connects to your soundcard (have a sound card that connects to a telephony modem). Doing the actual connecting will involve a ribbon cable between the cards.

Connect the modem to your wall jack, dial your voicemail, set the soundcard to record from the modem.

Convert resulting .wav to mp3.
posted by orthogonality at 7:33 PM on November 9, 2005

Pure, USB genius: http://www.ovolab.com/phlink/
posted by clango at 9:11 PM on November 9, 2005

Best answer: Unless I miss my mark, you want to get the voicemails from the Treo (which are essentially stored at Rogers) onto your PC, right?

The simplest method I can think of here is this:

1) Use a 'tap' from your regular landline phone and plug that into the PC. Then call your Treo from that phone, log into your voicemail.

2) Listen to the messages you want, recording them onto the PC through the analog phone.

The reason I suggest this is if you cable out of the phone into the PC, you may not be able to hear what's going on unless you have your soundcard set up so that you can 'monitor' what it's recording over the speakers.

The other option available to you is to use some kind of 'softphone' and call your Treo from the PC, log in and listen to messages, and tell the soundcard to record 'what you hear' and store in whatever format (most likely .WAV) and then convert it to MP3 with whatever you want.

BTW - MP3PRO codecs are actually better, and will result in smaller file sizes - you didn't say how much archiving you were doing here, but that could be a factor.
posted by TeamBilly at 7:55 AM on November 10, 2005