How To: Retrieve saved Voicemail from your iPhone using iTunes to Backup to Windows

DustinB3403

So besides being incredibly annoying, there is no free tool to do this. Sure the paid tools work, but who wants to spend money for it when you can have it for free. ** conditions apply **

Namely the nice file names so you know what is what.. . . but Whatever. .

In this How-To I'll guide you through the process of exporting your Voicemails from an iPhone to your Windows Computer.

Download and Install iTunes compatible for your iPhone Version
Backup your iPhone to your computer
Browse to the backup directory, generally C:\users\ <USERNAME>\Appdata\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ <Some random file name>
Copy your most recent file backup to a more managable place, like "c:" and name it something simple like "phone"
Download Cgywin from here
Run Cygwin and change directories to "c:\phone" assuming you took my recommendation.
Type the below commands
```
file *
```

At this point the Cygwin terminal seems pretty full.

Copy the records from the Cygwin Terminal into your favorite Spreadsheet editor. (I used Excel)
Data to Columns the first row, using a colon as the delimiter.
Filter out everything except for files that have the "Adaptive Multi-Rate Codec (GSM telephony)" type
Copy those records into a clean section or book. Lastly copy these records out into a phone.txt. Save the file to "C:\phone"

Back in Cygwin run the below command

cat phone.txt | while read line; do mv $line $line.amr; done

Once that's completed you can copy all of the records out that now have the VLC player icon, these are your voicemails.
Listen to and delete everything you don't need.
Really useful when you have anything more then 1 Voicemail.

DustinB3403

The reason I made this, was because I manage cell phones for our organization, and to upgrade from an iPhone 5 to an iPhone 6, you're voicemail box is deleted, you have to recreate it. Which means you'd effectually lose your "saved" voicemail.

Now this is obviously a misnomer, your voicemail messages clearly aren't safe if you're device gets destroyed, so you're SOL. That or backup your important voicemail beforehand. But who really does?

In this case, a user wanted to upgrade her phone, but had over 600 voicemail messages on her phone... all of which are unplayable on Windows without giving them an extension.

But Apple in all of it's wisdom decided to make things "User friendly". But not so much for the people that have to deal with their equipment.

This could also be useful for court cases etc if you ever need to save a voicemail that an employee has received. ETC ETC.

Dashrender

Nice Job - 600 Voicemails? really? that person just needs to be _________________. Glad they aren't my problem

DustinB3403

I even got a $10.00 Gift Card for my efforts.

Who knew, I wasn't expecting anything.