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iPhone My dad died & I don't want to lose his voicemails when I sell my iPhone.

ZCherub

ZCherub

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 7, 2010
652
2
GA, USA
I'm posting this here because it's the only forum I really frequent... I picked up an Android phone last month (I still use Apple for my work & my wife's personal phone, though), & I'm looking to sell my unlocked iP4.

My only hang up is that my dad died earlier this year & I have a few voicemails from him still on the phone. It may sound a little silly/overly sentimental, but I'd really rather not lose those as it's one of the last few ways I have of hearing his voice now.

Is there any way to save one or two of them to an MP3 before I restore the phone & sell it?

Incidentally, if anyone wants to buy an unlocked GSM iP4, let me know, lol.

Thanks in advance for any assistance w/ the VM issue!

-Mike
 
Maybe record them in a voice memo application on your Android device, as long as you're cool with that.

Sorry for your loss.
 
My condolences on your loss.

PhoneView for the Mac will save voicemails (and texts) to your computer. (I think you'll need to purchase the full version to do this.) Edit: PhoneView does require Visual Voicemail to be enabled the phone carrier according to their site, so that may be an issue for some. TouchCopy for Windows *used* to do this (I've used it in the past), but I'm not seeing on their site that they still do. This recent thread on Apple's forums mentions iExplorer as another option: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4898483?start=0&tstart=0

You may then need a further app to convert them to mp3 format--we did this a few years back with a friend's never jailbroken, totally stock iPhone, so I know it can be done. Can't remember what app I used for the conversion though--it was either free or very low cost, something I found via Google. I'll see if I can dredge it back up. Edit: I've apparently deleted whatever utility I used for conversion. But I did just transfer a visual voicemail from PhoneView to my desktop--for reference, it's an m4a file, and does play in iTunes without further conversion. Looks like there are a few possible utilities out there that will convert to mp3 if needed.

Hope that helps!
 
Last edited:
ZCherub said:
I'm posting this here because it's the only forum I really frequent... I picked up an Android phone last month (I still use Apple for my work & my wife's personal phone, though), & I'm looking to sell my unlocked iP4.

My only hang up is that my dad died earlier this year & I have a few voicemails from him still on the phone. It may sound a little silly/overly sentimental, but I'd really rather not lose those as it's one of the last few ways I have of hearing his voice now.

Is there any way to save one or two of them to an MP3 before I restore the phone & sell it?

Incidentally, if anyone wants to buy an unlocked GSM iP4, let me know, lol.

Thanks in advance for any assistance w/ the VM issue!

-Mike
Click to expand...
I found this for Windows.

There's this too.

And on a Mac, there's Phoneview, (Edit, as mentioned above).

I've never used any of these methods so I cannot vouch for them.

Not silly or overly-sentimental. I save the VMs of my wife (she is still alive though) and play them back sometimes when I'm particularly depressed. Totally understand that, preserving a link to your dad and all.

Good luck to you!
 
I'm sorry for your loss. For what it's worth, I went through the exact same situation four years ago. I used Skype from my laptop…called the voicemail service and recorded directly from the speaker output. Let me know if you have any questions.
 
you could always jailbreak, even if its a tethered, download the voicemail app/tweak in cydia (can't recall the name) and forward (if you have visual voicemail) the voicemail messages to your email. That's what I do for all voicemails I get from my folks and kids.
 
I'm sorry to hear that mate, it must be so hard ... Sorry, can't help you but just wanted to share your sadness.
 
This post hit me kind of hard too. I'm sorry for your loss. I don't have an apple device anymore, but what I used to do was use a program called iFunbox which will let you view all of the files on your phone, and you should be able to copy them over to the computer with that. Again, sorry to hear about your dad.
 
So sorry for your loss.

I am not sure how to do it but I have received via iMessage copies of voicemail messages. So I guess there is a share button somewhere. If there is, you could share those messages and send them to your pc or to your phone.
 
Sorry for your loss. The same situation happened to me. I purchased Decipher Voicemail and it worked great.
 
I may be missing something but how are voicemails ON the phone? Did you use the iphone to record the audio from another device? If not voicemails should not be phone specific.
 
ZCherub said:
I'm posting this here because it's the only forum I really frequent... I picked up an Android phone last month (I still use Apple for my work & my wife's personal phone, though), & I'm looking to sell my unlocked iP4.

My only hang up is that my dad died earlier this year & I have a few voicemails from him still on the phone. It may sound a little silly/overly sentimental, but I'd really rather not lose those as it's one of the last few ways I have of hearing his voice now.

Is there any way to save one or two of them to an MP3 before I restore the phone & sell it?

Incidentally, if anyone wants to buy an unlocked GSM iP4, let me know, lol.

Thanks in advance for any assistance w/ the VM issue!

-Mike
Click to expand...

My condolences, good sir. :(

Definitely try out Phoneview on the iPhone. I tried it out a few years back and I was skeptical that it wasn't for Jailbroken since my 3GS was jailbroken and I gave it a shot since I needed to restore the phone since it wasn't working properly. I was tinkering with it and saving old Texts and I eventually figured out that it could actually save Voicemails, etc while the phone didn't even work properly. It's pretty impressive, IMHO. I think it was $20 back then and I have no idea if it's the same.

This guy has the link to check them out. I still use it and backup my texts fairly often on it. Good luck.
eyoungren said:
And on a Mac, there's Phoneview, (Edit, as mentioned above).
Click to expand...
 
jdaniel said:
I may be missing something but how are voicemails ON the phone? Did you use the iphone to record the audio from another device? If not voicemails should not be phone specific.
Click to expand...

If you have visual voicemail, the voicemails are downloaded to your phone as a data file and played back from there.
 
Nothing wrong with being sentimental, sorry for the loss.

Maybe play them and record them onto the new device? (if that hasn't been recommended already).
 
ZCherub said:
I'm posting this here because it's the only forum I really frequent... I picked up an Android phone last month (I still use Apple for my work & my wife's personal phone, though), & I'm looking to sell my unlocked iP4.

My only hang up is that my dad died earlier this year & I have a few voicemails from him still on the phone. It may sound a little silly/overly sentimental, but I'd really rather not lose those as it's one of the last few ways I have of hearing his voice now.

Is there any way to save one or two of them to an MP3 before I restore the phone & sell it?

-Mike
Click to expand...

Very sorry for your loss. My wife had the exact same issue when her father recently passed and I did this for her - very simple and hack free. She had 30 of them saved. Best of luck.

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39...s-to-your-computer-with-a-simple-audio-trick/
 
Sorry for your loss

Hope you are able to save your dad's VMs. Not silly at all. It's nice to have voice recordings of our loved ones.

Hope you can get this done.
 
Get a headphone to headphone cord and a sound recorder application for your computer. plug one side into the phone and the other side into the mic/line-in port on the computer. Hit record on the sound recorder and play the voicemails. I just did this for my mom for the exact same reason.
 
McBeats said:
Get a headphone to headphone cord and a sound recorder application for your computer. plug one side into the phone and the other side into the mic/line-in port on the computer. Hit record on the sound recorder and play the voicemails. I just did this for my mom for the exact same reason.
Click to expand...

See post #16 which already gave that option
 
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