Any one have a way of export PBX Voicemail to WAV file

[dvigna]

We are moving a site from traditional PBX and voicemail (NEC 2000 IVS and Centigram)to IPT.

Management has requested that we save the voicemails of a user whose wife recently passed away. Since he has several saved messages from her.

Any one know of a down and dirty way of recording these to a WAV file?

[jasyoung]

I ran into the very same thing a couple years ago at a bank in Maryland. We were migrating them off a Definity PBX and Intuity voicemail system. A few of their auto-attendant greetings were still in the voice of an employee who lost the fight against breast cancer the year before, and they wanted to at least grab copies of it and possibly reuse them.

The best thing we could really come up with was manual use of TRAP. We would go to a call handler greeting in Unity SA web and start a TRAP recording session to our IP phone, answer it and then immediately stop it from the UI. When you do this, Unity isn't recording anymore but the phone call to TRAP is still up. We would then use the IP phone to conference in the old voicemail system and play the old greeting, and start and stop TRAP recording at the right times.

This takes some fine timing because you probably need to enter digits to play the right message on the old voicemail system, and TRAP stops recording when it hears any digits. You have to hit the right digit to play the message and then start TRAP recording with your mouse at nearly the same instant. Your task is probably easier if the old voicemail system plays the message envelope first, because you can just capture that too and it doesn't matter if the first second or two is cut off. We were trying to snag greetings that played immediately after you hit the digit to play it. You can also do all of this using the Outlook VMO control if you want, it works mostly the same way.

You can use the recording control to save the recording to disk wherever you want. Hit the 'down' triangle on the recording control and use 'Copy to file'. You can burn those WAV files off to data or audio format CDs, or copy it into arbitrary Unity greetings. If you have unified messaging and a desktop with the Outlook VMO plug-in, you could use it to send a new voicemail and paste the WAV file in ('Paste from file'), and put it back in his voicemail box. I suspect in your case the husband would be happy with a simple audio CD, but you've got all the options you want once you capture it with TRAP.

[Tommer Catlin]

I would just plug in a mic to your PC, use the Windows record feature that is built in. Play the voicemail off the NEC system and put the MIC next to the phone and record the coverstation to WAV. Then like Jasyoung said, burn to CD, make two copies and give to the employee.

You can essantially do this with Unity, but using the IP phone as a MIC and TRAP to wav...export the file save to CD.

The only other way is to bridge the two systems, OR... you could do this also.... possibly... create an analog port on the Unity. The centigram could possibly forward the message to the Unity server via the analog port. But you would need a Dialogic card for this or a router of some sort.

I'd stick with the Windows Recorder and mic off the sound card.... should work fine.

[Rob Huffman]

Hi Jason ... as always,you present a very thoughtful response. I have had similar situations in the past, but could never come up with a good way of conserving these most valuable messages.(Octel) I will now know what to do when we do transition to Unity.

Keep up the great work!!

Thanks again!

Rob

[holzwaku]

I have a similar problem, and am going to use Unity's Live Record utility to record the prompts to a .wav file. http://www.ciscounitytools.com/HelpFiles/LiveRecord405/LiveRecordAppNote.htm

All you need to do is make a phone call to another phone, then conference in the prompts from the old system and it'll all be recorded. Then using a sound editing program you could cut off any leading or trailing stuff you don't like.

[Hin Lee]

If this was unity, the messages are saved in exchange. You could access exchange via http:///exchange/ to save the wav file. This is not giving you permission to use it on a daily basis if you do not have unified messaging licensing.