We have to acquire voicemails from two older voice mail systems. The systems in question are a Toshiba Strategy, and Samsung Starmail system. The Toshiba has a 2.5 inch hard drive on the voicemail add in card, and the Samsung has an older IDE hard drive. Acquiring the images of the drives will most likely present no difficulties, however, the file types used to store the recorded voicemail data is proprietary and no one at Toshiba or Samsung seems to know anything about them, nor do they acknowledge the existence of any type of conversion or decoding program to convert their proprietary format to a more common format like .wav or .mp3.
Does anyone have any experience with a case like this? If so, what are your recommendations?
As it is right now, the plan is to acquire the drive, and then record all the voicemail account mailboxes manually through a phonecall recording system. We would then produce a report that linked each recorded mailbox to the associated account's file on the hard drive. not sure how much this will help if there is no way to decode the audio on the drive, but at least it will allow us to recreate the data and associate each recorded account with its relative folders/files.
We work with a local phone system reseller/service provider that has built a little kit with RCA plugs, alligator clips, mini-plugs, etc. that plug into a mini portable audio mixer to control levels and then into a PC to create WAV files for examination. They originally built it to save voice mails from systems as they are being replaced.
Once you get this imaged I'll bet you find PCM file headers.
Check here for .XXX
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Good luck.
Thank you. I will see if I can find these file types on the drive.
This is somewhat off topic, however, I want to mention something FWIW. We had a similar case where we had about 6 months worth of VM, involving about 20 employees (2500 messages). While we didn't have too much trouble retrieving the messages and converting to a digestible format (MP3's), we ended up having to transcribe all the messages for review, discussion, court, etc. I used what is basically a secretarial service to transcribe all the messages. In hindsight, it would have been easier to simply transcribe the messages right from the start. Providing you can archive the raw files, you may want to just transcribe them to paper. I guess it depends on your particular situation.
I had the same delima with the Toshiba Strategy and after two weeks on the phone talking to all the wrong people, I found a telephone technician blog and had the answer in 5 minutes. You need to know the IP of your VM system and can initiate a NetMeeting session with the device which gives you full access to the file system. If memory serves correct the messages were stored in the strategy folder off the root. Each phone number/mailbox had its own folder and the VM's were in there in a standard audiofile format. It was fairly easy to get to the messages but I never could find any assistance\open source utilities to read the database that manages them.
PS..I used click to convert to save the vm audio files into .wav or other genaric audio format.