Phone company recordings archive
The Phone Recording Archive sports hundreds of samples of recorded voices from different phone systems around the USA, including a ton of old Bell System clips, such favorites as:
* Invalid Access codeLink (Thanks, Luke!)
* Not from this calling area
* All circuits are busy
* Can't process custom calling request
* Dial 1 first
* Disconnected number
* Don't dial 0
* Don't dial 1
* Please hang up and try again
* Due to heavy calling...
* Please check the instruction manual
* Call not completed as dialed
* Call did not go through
* Call not completed, please check number or call operator
* Due to telephone company facility trouble...
* Not from the phone you are using
the latest
latest episodes
Awesomesauce! I love this crap. My (missing) favorite that I used for my outgoing answering machine message after stumbling across it back in the back in the day dialing 800 numbers to see if anything cool was on the other end was, "Due to earthquake in the area dialed, your call cannot be completed as dialed".
couple of fun games using that london underground
announcers voice
play with fridge magnets
http://www.emmaclarke.com/fun/fridge-magnet-game
or create your own script
http://www.emmaclarke.com/fun/create-your-own-voiceover
Lovely resource. Play them on a loop any time you wish to feel disconnected.
The boop-bep-beep (that is my best written description, pls advise if there is a better one) in front of these used to terrify me when I was little. I've actually had nightmares about it that I can still remember many years later.
I tried to listen to one of the clips in that archive just now and it still kind of freaks me out.
Please tell me I am not alone!
The background to that website is a magic eye, sweet!
@1 KNOWLES: Here's another similar page that does include the earthquake message.
@4 TM: Those are the special information tones (SIT) which indicate that a telephone call cannot be completed. It used to be that if you put these tones on your answering machine (before your actual outgoing message), that it would fool telemarketers' autodialers into thinking that your number was invalid, so you would get automatically removed from their dialing list. (This was also actually marketed as a add-on gadget called the Telezapper.)
Geek sauce. I downloaded all of them.
Fantastic. Some of these would be excellent ringtones.
I'm trying to place the accent on that voice, it sounds like there's a slight Southern aspect to it, perhaps the speaker is trying to disguise it. I notice it most in words like "help" and "again".
From my time in Germany I have "kein anschluss unter dieser nummer" burned into my brain.
I find the "no need to dial 1" very very very annoying.
oi! genuine telco drone here ( on the job right now, bro ). going back, switches kept those messages on annunciators, so you hit a dialstring the machine don't like, it directs to one of these. sometimes a failure of some kind took out some cards, you'd have to record these yourself until you could run the original outgoing messages back in. if you couldn't get to it or forgot, like a month later you'd hit the announcement & go "hey, that's Dave".
Arg. I always hated those high-pitched tones. Why do they need to be directly in your ear & often so painfully LOUD? It's not just the phone company too, since many companies do that while routing your call to other phones. It's completely unnecessary & very irritating. /rant
Err... interesting archive tho'.
Who knows the story behind the TelCo audio alert that continuously cycled through a rising and falling "reeeeeooorrrrrreeeeoooorrrrrreeeeoooorrrr"... Each "reeeooorrr" might have been about 3/4's of a second, the low note was separated from the high note by about a Major 7th. It wasn't shrill, so much as it was kind of an annoyingly comical sound. Could've come from the audio department of the Warner Bros cartoon building.
It happened when you messed up dialing, or something. Haven't heard it in probably 20 years, maybe more.
Always wondered what it was supposed to signal.
No if they could only release these archives as Creative Commons, then we might get somewhere.
http://www.audiodrums.com
Cool, JJJ -- thanks for the inside baseball!