I’ve got a bunch of voice mails from my dad, who died in March, on my phone. They’re all completely mundane (I haven’t got the guts to listen to them but I promise you they all say “Zsofia! This is your father. It’s, mmm, 10:30 on Monday the 18th. Give me a call at the house.”, all information efficiently conveyed by the fact that he called in the first place) but I guess they’re the only thing I have with his voice on it and I need to make sure I can keep them.
I’ve seen some solutions with various apps and such but before I go messing around with them I thought I’d ask you guys what the simplest most elegant solution is (and ideally a way that doesn’t involve me listening to them, like if I used Audacity.)
There is no “simple” way with just the stock iOS to transfer voice mail messages to your computer. Your choices (like you mentioned) are either a specialized app like iExplorer from Macroplant, or using Audacity connected to your computer to record them one by one.
I would go with iExplorer…it seems like you can bulk transer.
When you open a voicemail message on your iPhone there is the stock “share” (a rectangle with an up arrow in it) icon in the upper right and corner. It gives you the option of emailing (among other things) the audio file to yourself.
Your post made me cry, as it reminded me of the only voice recording of my late husband that I have. He had a meltingly sweet Texas accent.
Instead of trying to save them on the iPhone and trust that they WILL in fact be saved, I’d advise you to get a little digital voice recorder (something like this) and to play the messages on speakerphone into the recorder and save them that way. With most digital voice recorders, you can install something that will let you save the recording on your computer. Where it will be safe (if you back it up on a couple of flash drives or something).
If you can’t bring yourself to listen to them yet in order to record them (and I don’t blame you one bit), get the instructions very clear in your head or in writing and ask someone else to play/save them for you.
Second this approach. It’s what I did to save a “voice memo” on my iPhone and then I listened to the audio file to confirm I’d received it properly. But if you don’t want to listen to the messages, you might hand your phone to a friend and ask them to forward the messages to your inbox or theirs, and ask them to verify that everything came over OK.
Thanks, guys. I just spent some time emailing everything from the house phone and his cell to my Gmail account - it won’t all be him but no way was I going to listen to find out. I did one to check it and it was awful. The worst thing is how many of them were still marked as “unread”, which is silly to feel bad about because it’s not like I didn’t call him back, I just didn’t listen to a content free voice mail. But still.
Since I was already crying I took the opportunity to go in and take his name out of my favorite contacts list too. Hadn’t quite been able to do that before.
OMG. That is huge. I didn’t take my late husband’s name out until I got a new phone. It took several phone upgrades before I finally removed all the people who have died from my contacts list. I figure if I get a call from The Other Side, I want to know who’s calling.
Frequently I don’t delete from contact lists the people who are no longer active in my life, for one reason or another.
If the list sorts by last name (for example) I place ZZZ at the beginning of the last name so it drops to the bottom of the list.
I also insert spaces in the phone #/email address so I don’t accidentally call/email the person, for example: 12 3-4 56-789 and Somebody @ gmail .com.
