Voice notes, old voicemails, camcorder tapes, a half-recorded conversation on a phone. What to do first, and what they can become.
Do the safe, boring thing first: make a second copy somewhere that is not the phone or the tape, and give every file a name with a date in it. Nothing else you might do with a recording matters if the only copy is on a handset. After that, the useful question is what you want it to become: a transcript you can read, a written story, or simply a saved voice you can find when you want it.
First, make them safe
This takes twenty minutes and it is the only part that is urgent.
Get a second copy off the original device. A phone is one drop, one wipe or one lost handset away from being the end of it. Email the files to yourself, put them in Google Drive, iCloud or Dropbox, or copy them onto a computer. Then make a third copy somewhere different.
Save voicemails properly. A saved voicemail sitting in your phone’s voicemail box is not a file you own. Networks do not keep them indefinitely and the rules differ between them. On most phones you can share or export a visual voicemail as an audio file; if yours cannot, playing it on speaker and recording it on a second phone is worse quality but far better than losing it.
Name everything. Date first, then who is on it: 2019-04 Mum birthday voice note.m4a. Files called New Recording 12 do not get listened to, because nobody can face finding out which one is which.
Write a one-line index. A note or a spreadsheet, one line per recording: date, who, roughly what it is. If there are more than about five recordings, this is what makes them usable.
If it is on tape
Cassettes, mini-DV, VHS, reel to reel and dictaphone micro-cassettes all need converting before anything else can happen, and they all degrade in storage.
Two routes. A transfer service will do it for you: local photography and video shops often handle cassette and VHS, and there are postal services that do the same. Or you can do it yourself with a player and a cheap audio interface, which is cheaper and slower, and only sensible if there are a lot of tapes.
Two things worth knowing before you start. Play nothing important on a machine you do not trust, because a tape eaten once is gone. And convert everything in one go if you can, rather than picking out the tapes you think matter, because the labels are frequently wrong.
Getting the words out
Once the audio is on a computer, getting a transcript is now easy and mostly free.
- Most phones will transcribe a voice note directly in the recorder or notes app.
- Word, Google Docs and similar tools will transcribe an uploaded audio file.
- Dedicated transcription services do a better job with accents, overlapping speech and poor audio.
Expect a rough result. Automatic transcription struggles with regional accents, older voices, hearing aids, background noise and two people talking at once, which is to say it struggles with exactly the recordings families tend to have. Treat the transcript as a searchable index of what is in the recording, not as a document you can hand to anyone.
A transcript is also not a story. It is a wall of half sentences, false starts and answers that arrive twenty minutes after the question. Useful to work from, hard to read.
What they can become
A saved voice. Sometimes the right answer is to do nothing more than back it up properly and tell the rest of the family where it is.
A written story. The recordings, in the right order, written up so it reads properly and sounds like them. This is what I do, and existing recordings are a normal starting point for it: you do not need to have recorded anything to a particular standard, or at all recently.
Something a family can share. A written piece, with photographs, printed as a book, or kept digitally so everyone has a copy.
If the person has died
Recordings you did not know you had are common after someone dies: a voicemail nobody deleted, a video from a wedding, a voice note about nothing in particular.
The practical advice above does not change. Back it up today, before anything else, and before any handset gets returned, wiped or cancelled. Phone contracts get closed quickly after a death, and cloud accounts get closed with them.
What is different is that you do not have to do anything with it yet. There is no deadline on deciding, as long as the files themselves are safe. If and when you do want it turned into something to keep, after they have gone covers how that works, including where there are gaps and where other people in the family can fill them in.
If you want them written up
Send me a message and tell me what you have: roughly how many recordings, how long, what format, and who is on them. I will tell you honestly whether there is enough there to work with, and what it would take.