Every now and then, you get a voicemail that you want or need to keep. Whether it is your company’s client, or your son singing ‘Happy birthday’, some recordings are worth saving. When your cell phone is the very popular iPhone, you may have difficulties saving them, as Apple doesn’t like customers to freely transfer files and data from and to their phones. Luckily, there are several ways around this limitation, and this guide will show you how.

If you have an iPhone that has been jailbroken, you can use SSH File Transfer to copy the files directly from your iPhone to your Computer. You can learn how to jailbreak an iPhone here. Please note that jailbreaking will void the warranty of your iPhone. With your jailbroken iPhone, follow these steps to copy the voicemails to your computer:

1. If not already on, switch your iPhone on
2. On your iPhone, go to “Settings”and select “Wi-Fi”, and there select your network. This will show you your connection details. Note and remember the IP address that is listed.
3. Start up your FTP client software. If you don’t have an FTP client, you can download one for free. Excellent free FTP clients are Filezilla http://filezilla-project.org/download.php and SmartFTP http://www.smartftp.com/download/
4. connect your FTP program to the IP address of your iPhone. Unless you changed your username and password, you can use user: ‘root’ and password ‘alpine’. Make sure to select SFTP, otherwise you can’t provide the username and password.
5. Browse to /private/var/mobile/Library/Voicemail/
6. In this directory, you find all voicemails, in .AMR files.
7. Transfer the files that correspond with the voicemails you want to save
8. The .AMR files can be played using Apple’s QuickTime

If you don’t have an iPhone that has been jailbroken, and don’t want to do that either, you have to resort to re-recording your voicemail. In this method you connect your iPhone’s headphone jack to your computer’s line-in, and use a sound recorder to re-record the voicemail as you play it on your iphone.

1. First off, you need the right cable. Different generations of iPhones have different types of earphone plugs, but most common is a regular Auxiliary Audio Cable. You might need a converter to connect the cable to your iPhone.
2. If you have audio recording software, start it up now. If you don’t have this software yet, is it advised to use the free Audacity, which can be downloaded here, in combination with audio editing codec LAME, which can be obtained here.
3. When setting up Audacity, ensure you configure it to use ‘Line In’ as the sound input. Also, you may want to lower the Input Volume, which is at maximum by default. Make sure Audacity uses the LAME library. From the Audacity menu, Select “Edit”, choose “Preferences”, and click the “File Formats” tab. Click on the “Find Library” button, and browse to the location where you stored LAME.
4. On the same “File Formats” tab, we can set the recording format. Preferably, use an uncompressed export format, and a bitrate of at least 128.
5. Start recording, and after that, start playback of the voicemail on your iPhone.
6. Once the voicemail is completely played, stop recording.

You now have a recording of your voicemail on the computer, but it is buried in a lead in and lead-out silence, which needs to be removed.

1. Use “Zoom” (the magnifying glass with a plus in it) to zoom in on the voicemail part of the recording. Use the play button to check you have the correct selection.
2. Use the “select” tool to highlight your voicemail
3. Choose “Edit”, “Trim”.
4. Save your work by selecting “File”, "Export as MP3" Remember the name and location where you save your work.

You are done, your voicemail is recorded on your computer