Gadgetory

once in a while you get that voicemail from a friend or family member who cared enough to pick up the phone and wish you happy birthday or tell you something special and if it's really meaningful you might want to save it on your computer for safekeeping the thing is you can't just drag and drop voicemails from your phone to your computer on the iPhone voicemails are stored on your computer when you sync it but the files are stored in weird unreadable formats likewise unless your Android has a visual voicemail service with forwarding like t-mobile your voicemails are stored on your carrier server there are a few ways you can save voicemails but after a lot of consideration I realized that the best way to get your voicemails from your phone onto your PC is with a simple audio trick to get started you'll need a Mac or PC with audacity installed and a stereo or audio cable also known as aux or Minnie - Minnie now plug the cable into your microphone port and launch audacity first off you want to make sure you can hear what you're doing so go to preferences and check the box next to software play through next grab your phone and find your voicemail if you have visual voicemail like the iPhone it's easy just find it in the list here plug the audio cable into your phone and press record on audacity then hit play on your phone a happy birthday all right you'll see the waveforms show up as it records if the level is too low you can always turn up the volume on your phone when it's done hit stop and play it back to make sure it worked hey happy birthday I hope your days awesome see you later right now if you have one of the many Android phones that doesn't have visual voicemail like this Galaxy Nexus you'll have to call your voicemail service so after you plug the cable into your phone hit record call your voicemail service please edit your path 1 then press pound enter your password do all that you have to new voice messages then player message hey hey I hope you have a great day and when it's done stop recording now hit play to playback your voicemail hey you can trim off all that extra audio by highlighting it with your cursor then hitting delete hey I hope you have when you're done go to file export give it a name and then select the file type you want to save it as like mp3 or WAV hit save and you're done if you're like Sharon I don't have a mic input well there is another quick and dirty option unplug any audio cables turn monitoring off in audacity and hit record then play the voice mail back through your speakerphone while pointing it at your laptop's mic this isn't the best audio quality but since the voicemail is crappy to begin with you won't hear a huge difference the same method could be used with your friend's phone just launch a recording program on their phone play your voicemail and then email the recording to yourself finally if you want to save all of your voicemails going forward consider using a service like Google Voice or you mail if you have any questions or want to follow all of my how-tos and tricks hit me up on Twitter and subscribe to my facebook profile frisina comm I'm Sharon Vaknin