Here's an oddball.

My grandfather passed away a year ago, but his voice still graces my grandmother's answering machine. It's a bit creepy to me, but everybody else seems to like it. The problem is that the answering machine is probably 30 years old (my grandfather used to sell and service them, back in the days when an answering machine was an expensive piece of business equipment). The cassette tape is warbly and may soon give out and die. I tossed out the suggestion of getting my grandmother a new machine and putting the old message on it and all parties concerned seem to think this is a fine idea.

Technical challenges:

What's the right way to do the transfer? Most modern digital answering machines have only one way of getting content into them, via microphone. Part of me says that I want to first try to suck the tape into my computer and maybe I can do some cleanup on the signal, although it doesn't need to be particularly stellar. Then, what, play it on a stereo and hold up the answering machine?

Some answering machines allow you to call in a new message. Maybe playing it back via a voice modem would work. (Can you still get a voice modem?)

If you can call it in, you could likely use a voip program to dump it as cleanly as possible into the unit? (ie phone using voip and push the sound into the uplink?)

Seems to me that it depends how much you are prepared to get inside the new answering machine: If you disconnect the mike and put a resistance in line with the line-out of your PC, you could make a near perfect transcription.
However, it also seems to me, that having gone to all that trouble, on any answering machine I've used, it would be much too easy for your grandmother to delete the recording.
Wouldn't it be much simpler just to give her a CD of her husband's voice?

Sorry, I think I've missed the point here: You want to keep it as the ougoing message, not just as a keepsake? In which case ignore my last two paras.

After chatting with my grandmother, it's apparently other people who like to hear my departed grandfather's voice. She never hears the outgoing message herself and would find it too painful if she did.

Conclusion: I'm going to pull the cassette and digitize it, so she's got it if she wants it, and we'll put a fresh new message on the machine. Next step: shopping for something simple and bulletproof.

Okay. It was sort of understandable if your grandmother wanted it but other people is just kinda weird to say the least.


When I bought a new answer machine for my mum, I just found the cheapest digital one that I could since that meant it had the least features as well. It just has on/off, play, stop and delete buttons with a big LED counter for number of messages. The only thing I ever need to do is occasionally reset the clock on it.