Turn on your speaker, listen to the voicemail, and save it to another device. Many smartphones or tablets have built-in voice memo or recording apps that you can use for free. As for laptops, they almost certainly have a built-in microphone – you just need the right software. We recommend using the free Audacity app for Windows or Mac’s built-in QuickTime player to record audio.
If you want your recorded voicemail messages to sound as good as possible, you’ll need to connect your phone directly to your computer with an audio cable.
For many newer flip phones you can use a common aux cable – it has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack on each end. (You may already have one if you’ve ever connected your phone or MP3 player to your car stereo.) If your phone is older, it may only accept a small 2.5mm plug, but don’t worry: 2.5mm to -3.5mm cables are still easy to find.
Once you have your cable, plug one end into your phone and the other into your computer’s microphone port. You can usually spot them by looking for a headphone jack with a little microphone icon or a pink border.
Then launch the recording app of your choice and choose your phone as the “input”.
In Audacity, your phone (possibly called “microphone” or “microphone array”) should appear in the drop-down menu next to the microphone icon. If you’re using QuickTime on a Mac, click File, then New Audio Recording, then click the little down arrow next to the record button and select your phone.
Finally, start recording by clicking the big red button, then press play on your phone’s voicemail. If everything went well, you will now have a high-quality copy of that precious voicemail.
Once you’ve saved the voicemail to your device of choice, save it (sometimes this happens automatically) and put it somewhere safe.
However you save a copy of these voicemails, we recommend that you put them in several places – for example, your computer, an external drive and in cloud storage – just to be safe.
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