Custom Greetings in Voicemail Pro

1. Go find a Windows XP or Server 2003 machine – you know you have one somewhere – and copy this file C:\Windows\System32\sndrec32.exe and copy it to your Windows 7 or 8 machines.

2. Open the XP / 2003 Sound Recorder App:

3. Click File, Properties:

4. Click Convert Now…

5. Change your settings to

Format: PCM (that’s the default, so nothing to change here)

Attributes: 8.000 kHz, 16 Bit, Mono

To save yourself some time, after you make that selection do like I did and click the Save As… button and give it an easy to remember name such as “Avaya IP Office”.  Next time you can just select that item from the list instead of picking from the long list of possible attributes.

Record your greeting

At this point you’re recording DIRECTLY into the correct format.  Doing this provides a far superior recording in my opinion to recording in some other format and trying to convert it down to this format.

Remember to change the setting EVERY TIME you record a new recording

This setting doesn’t “Stick” so remember every time you save the file and create a new one to go back into the properties and change it again to these settings.

Recording Tip: Avoid “Popping” sound with a piece of paper

The biggest problem I had with recording at this sampling rate is that “pop” sounds are exaggerated even more than normal.

The easiest way to avoid this problem: hold a piece of paper between your mouth and the microphone.  In my case I just held the mic and the paper with my left hand – holding the paper between index and thumb, and the mic itself between index and middle fingers (it was a small, high-quality Sony lapel mic I purchased a few years ago).

Tip #2: Take advantage of multiple files

It can be a lot of work to record an entire introduction as a single “work”.  Instead, take advantage of the fact that the system will seamlessly play one file after the other and break it up into discrete different files:

In this screen shot of the Avaya Voicemail Pro Client day routing you can see I’ve got 5 files listed.  I saved them with number prefixes while I was recording them to make it easy to selected, and put the first part of what I actually said directly in the filename to make it easy to find later.