Professionally Recording Voicemail?

MacOG728893

MacOG728893

macrumors 68000
I run my own small media solutions business and have of a lot professional high quality recording devices. What I was looking to do was record my own greeting with my personal equipment and then somehow using that for my voicemail. I haven't found any features on visual voicemail that allow a person to upload their own .mp3 greeting. Is this possible?
 
With no responses and my personal searching turning up nothing, I have come to the conclusion this is not possible at the moment.

That's too bad..
 
Sorry...we were sleeping over here.

I've never seen a way to upload the greeting, but you could use some of those high quality devices to record your greeting, then use something like an iRock or iRig cable on the iPhone to play it back when you record the message to voicemail.

It will be mono.
 
That's what I would recommend, too. This should produce a high enough quality of result that no one listening to the voicemail on their phone would be able to tell you didn't upload the file digitally....

BrianBaughn said:
It will be mono.
Click to expand...

Isn't this a limitation of ... phones? Does anything store or use stereophonic audio for telephony? Is there even a protocol for the received audio on a phone call to be stereo, even if the device (like an iPhone with a headset) could play it (actually, I don't know the answer to this question).
 
BrianBaughn said:
Sorry...we were sleeping over here.

I've never seen a way to upload the greeting, but you could use some of those high quality devices to record your greeting, then use something like an iRock or iRig cable on the iPhone to play it back when you record the message to voicemail.

It will be mono.
Click to expand...

Sounds interesting, but how exactly is the iRig going to play it back? Is not still limited by the mic on the phone?
 
MacOG728893 said:
Sounds interesting, but how exactly is the iRig going to play it back? Is not still limited by the mic on the phone?
Click to expand...

No, the iRig or iRock use the line-in jack that's on the mini-plug on the top of your phone. The same line-in used by the mic/headset that came with the phone. When that's plugged in, the phone's mic is disabled.

There are likely other devices you could get that connect to that jack...with different connectors on the other end. Search around to see what would work best for your setup.
 
MacOG728893 said:
Sounds interesting, but how exactly is the iRig going to play it back? Is not still limited by the mic on the phone?
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with the iRig specifically, but I think the general idea is that you're going to drive the output of your audio hardware (at appropriate level) to the mike line on the headphone jack of the iPhone. That will bypass the physical microphone on the iPhone. It might not be quite up to the level of a professional audio cable into a full size mono port, but it'll be close.
 
MacOG728893 said:
I run my own small media solutions business and have of a lot professional high quality recording devices. What I was looking to do was record my own greeting with my personal equipment and then somehow using that for my voicemail. I haven't found any features on visual voicemail that allow a person to upload their own .mp3 greeting. Is this possible?
Click to expand...

Interestingly enough, I found a MacRumors article on how to do this. It's quite dated (2007) so I'm not sure if it'll work but have a look and see if it helps.
 
Even with a quality source file, the chances are that it will be downsampled and not sound all the great for the caller anyway.

I have a decent-sounding IP phone at home, and while it's not perfect, the mic is a lot better than my iPhone. So when I need to record a greeting on my AT&T voicemail, I call my iPhone's number from the landline, let it roll over to Voicemail, enter my passcode and record my new greeting that way.

It's not excellent, but is *is* clean and clear - much better than using the iPhone to record a greeting.
 
If you DID have a jailbreak, the answer is to create a new greeting on your computer, convert it to .amr, rename it Greeting.amr, use Cyberduck or equivalent to navigate to /user/Library/Voicemail on the iPhone, record a new greeting on the phone...but don't hit "Save", replace the Greeting.amr file that is created on the iPhone with the one you made on your computer, then hit "Save" on the iPhone. The new greeting will be uploaded to the phone company servers.

.amr files are 12bit, 8kHz mono files and there's not a lot you can do to make them sound great, but it's how they sound to the caller that matters.

Audacity will convert to .amr.
 
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