My mother emailed me today to ask if there was a way her friend could save a voicemail on her Blackberry to a computer disk. Her husband is recently deceased and she has a saved message from him she’d like to retain. Of course voicemails aren’t stored on a Blackberry, but they are saved for a certain period of time on the carrier’s voicemail system.
I thought I could do it fairly easily using GMail’s phone calling feature and an audio capture utility for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba is the utility I already had, so I initiated a call to my own Verizon voicemail and turned on recording in AHP. But this wasn’t working out with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion); AHP isn’t fully compatible yet with the new sandboxing model in 10.7.
Next, reboot into 10.6.8 and try again there. This time it was working, but the recorded audio would not play through (though it does with other apps). So I could record the phone call but wouldn’t be able to respond to prompts.
Last try I used WireTap from Ambrosia Software and this time I was able to hear the audio during recording, and successfully created a recording.
For months my MBP 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (running Mac OS X 10.6.x) has been locking up under high CPU load. It happened most often when playing adobe flash video, or Silverlight video, but generally most anything that put high load on the CPU would eventually result in WindowServer locking up. For awhile I thought the video card was failing or maybe I had some bad RAM, but none of the research on those topics, or related to WindowServer choking produced any results.
UPDATE: I finally got to the bottom of this issue. It’s another defective GPU/video card in Mac laptops (actually, I think the ATIRadeon x1600 was used in other models which exhibit the same problems). There’s plenty of complaints and details to be found with this Google search: ATIRadeon x1600 Failures in Macs