Tobiasly’s Blog

We have used Vonage as our phone provider for almost a year now and have loved the service. One of the many features they add at no extra charge is the ability to have all voicemail messages sent as an email attachment. Unfortunately, they only send these attachments in WAV format, which means they take up a ton of room.

I like to store all voicemails I receive in case I need them later, and so I was looking for a way to shrink those emails down. I found this post describing how to do just that using Perl and LAME to convert the attachments to MP3.

Unfortunately, that script didn’t work quite right for me. I have cleaned it up a bit and posted it here for anyone interested.

[UPDATE] 2006.05.14: Towards the end of 2005, Vonage changed the format of their WAV file attachments to use an encoding called “CCITT u-Law” which LAME doesn’t understand. See my new post for a method using SOX instead.