For all the polish of Apple’s iPhone, there’s still a number of missing technological enhancements. For example, one would think that archiving voicemail in some manner would be a no brainer — saving a message to iTunes or emailing it beyond the confines of one’s handset. In preparation for an AT&T exodus and Verizon iPhone 4 purchase, that’s exactly what I wanted to do.
My initial plan to perserve a classic voicemail message involved a variety of mini plug cables. The thought was I’d have audio play over my iPhone headset jack which in turn would be received via the laptop’s audio input and recorded via Garage Band or Audio Hijack Pro. Unfortunately, at some point I realized that my current generation MacBook Air doesn’t really have audio in. So instead of dislocating the wife from her laptop for a similar attempt via Windows Movie Maker, I went with plan B…
Using Greenpois0n, I quickly jailbroke my iPhone… followed up by an install of the Cydia app store and SSH. Using my preferred OS X file transfer client Cyberduck, I wirelessly accessed the iPhone via SFTP using the default username (root) and password (alpine). Once in, I browsed to /private/var/mobile/Library/Voicemail/. Unfortunately, I rarely clean up after myself and was greeted by a rather a long list of .amr (adaptive multi-rate) audio files. So I copied them all down to my computer for safe keeping. While the .amr file type is new to me, QuickTime is familiar with it and had no trouble playing back messages until I found the one I was after.