Voicemail quality

[cmstlist]

I've contemplated using Fongo for voicemail-to-email, but after testing a few times I've concluded the voicemail audio quality is very poor. It sounds overly compressed, and I worry that I would find unfamiliar voices difficult to understand with such audio quality. In contrast my VM-to-email from Callcentric (admittedly a paid VoIP service) is quite crisp.

Is there any possibility the VM quality could be improved? It'd be nice to be able to cancel the Callcentric line as all I use it for now is voicemail.

[Jake]

Did you try the Freephoneline one? I believe the Fongo one is compressed so much because people will be using it over their phones, and so don't want massive data charges when checking voicemails.

I don't use either for voicemail so I have not checked lately, but you may find the FPL one better if you just want it for an answer phone.

[cmstlist]

Thanks, yes I've tried the FPL voicemail as well. The audio quality is equally poor.

It would be nice to have an option of increasing audio quality for voicemail. I would not want to miss out on an important callback because I'm unable to make out the voice in the message.

[intplus]

I have the same problem. The voicemail messages sent by email are really low in quality. The voice is very robotized, indicating that the file is compressed too much. An audio file recorded at 64 kbps and then compressed in MP3 will do that. I experimented the same problem in the past with other phone recording softwares. The MP3 compression is really not ideal for low bitrates and gives very poor results. A phone line is 64 kbps, so the bitrate is fine, but it should not be compressed using MP3. An alternative solution would be to record the file at 128 kbps and then compress it using MP3, the result is much better in quality and the audio file is still smaller than an uncompressed WAV at 64 kbps.

It would really be a good idea to have an option to choose the file quality or encoding in the FPL settings. Not everyone needs a very small file, having the choice would be nice.