Last updated: September 12, 2026
Where Five9 stores call recordings
Five9 saves each recorded call as a WAV file and keeps it for 30 days. An administrator finds it in the Recordings tab of the agent's user properties, and the same call shows up in call logs, worksheets, and call segment reports. Export runs through the Export > Recordings tab, which pushes files to your own FTP or SFTP server.
Recordings attach to the agent rather than to a folder you browse, and each file carries the session ID of the call, which is how a recording lines up with a call log row.
Whether a call gets recorded at all depends on recording ports. Five9 documents one port for a five seat account and two for a ten seat account, so with ten agents on calls at once, 20 percent of those calls are recorded. More ports raise the ceiling.
That reads like a licensing footnote until you build a QA sample from it. Say you run 18 agents and the floor takes 12,000 calls a month. Without extra ports you are sampling whatever slice concurrency caught, so check the port count before anybody argues about sample size.
The 30 day window and what closes it
The published retention policy lists VCC audio recordings as the sooner of 30 days, a successful offload over SFTP or FTP, or whatever your contract says. Call logs sit at 60 days on the same table, and Five9 states plainly that customers should keep this data themselves.
Two things end the window early. A completed FTP or SFTP transfer removes the original from the platform, and an optional setting named Delete after uploading strips the file the moment your server has it. Your archive then becomes the only archive.
Where the audio physically sits is configurable too. Five9 documents storing recordings at your regional telephony Point of Presence rather than a data center outside your region, arranged through a representative. Ask about that before a data residency clause gets tested. How long you must keep any of it is covered in call recording retention requirements by industry.
Getting recordings out of Five9
The documented path is Export > Recordings in the VCC Administrator application. Pick FTP or SFTP, enter a hostname as an IP address or fully qualified domain name, add credentials, and click Test before saving. SFTP with a security key takes a private key file rather than a password.
Spend your time on the file name pattern. Five9 builds the export path from named elements including agent_name, call_guid, campaign_name, created_date, length, number, session_id, and skill_name. The default is the agent's name with a time stamp, which stops identifying anything around the first thousand files. Put session_id or call_guid in that pattern before the first export runs, or nothing you score maps back to a call log row. A call_guid also ties the segments of one call together.
Campaign level FTP settings override the domain settings, worth remembering when files go missing.
Advanced Recording Upload, enabled per domain, adds FTPS, Google Drive, and Amazon S3 destinations, rules based upload, and segment stitching. Five9 recommends S3 above 25 agents, and upload status shows in the Recording Log report.
What Five9 documents as an API
Five9 publishes Core Platform REST APIs and Core Platform SOAP Web Services, and its support staff point customers at a knowledge article for downloading recordings through the REST API. That reference sits behind a login, so the endpoint and its limits stay unverified here rather than guessed at. For QA work the API is usually the wrong tool anyway, because scheduled SFTP delivery beats a poller for files the platform already ships.
Two channel or mixed mono, which decides speaker attribution
Nobody asks this until scoring is already live, and it decides more than any connector does. A mixed mono recording puts the agent and the caller into one audio channel, so software has to work out who spoke from voice characteristics alone. That job is speaker diarization. Two channel audio keeps each party separate and the question stops being a guess.
On the public Five9 forum, a customer asked how to change the default call recording from mono to stereo for all calls. A Five9 moderator answered that you notify your account manager, then coordinate with Five9 Support to process the request internally. Mono is the default, stereo exists, and moving between them is a conversation with Five9 rather than a checkbox an administrator flips. Several gated knowledge articles refer to stereo recording and speaker separation, so the detail behind that request is unverified here.
Asking for stereo is still the right first call. It helps less than you would hope with the archive you already have, though, because a mono file does not become two channel later. Six months of history stays mono whatever gets switched on today, so an evaluation built on that history runs through diarization either way.
Which is survivable, and worth saying plainly. Criteria that depend on knowing exactly who said a phrase get less reliable on mono audio, and that holds for any tool reading the file, ours included. A required disclosure or a do-not-say term still gets found. Pinning it on the agent rather than the caller is where confidence drops, which is why every flagged line should carry a timestamp a supervisor can jump to.
Recording format, and what a QA tool receives
Five9's knowledge base says recordings use lossy compression inside a WAV container, chosen for smaller files and faster downloads. No codec, sample rate, or bit depth is published anywhere readable without a login, so treat the encoding as unverified until you open a file from your own domain. One export through a media tool that reports format and channel count settles it.
Length has a ceiling too. One hour per call is the default, raised to three hours by request through Five9 support, and a segment recorded while a caller sat on hold is saved as its own file.
Getting a sample out for evaluation
Run these whoever you end up buying from, because an evaluation that skips them tests the vendor's demo audio rather than your calls.
- Pick a date range with a known problem in it, such as a week a client complained about.
- Confirm your port count, so you know what share of that week was captured.
- In Export > Recordings, put session_id or call_guid and created_date into the file name pattern.
- Export to SFTP, or pull a handful of files from the Recordings tab in a user's properties.
- Open one file and check its channel count and duration before sending it anywhere.
- Pull the matching call log rows, so every audio file has a record beside it.
- Score the set against your own rubric, then compare it to what supervisors scored by hand.
Recordings from Five9 reach CallSniper by export and upload today, and a direct connector is not shipped. Upload is how nearly every account starts, and the current platform position lives on the integrations page.
For a read on your own Five9 audio rather than a description of one, bring a week of exported calls to a working session and we will score them against your rubric on screen.
Frequently asked questions
How long does Five9 keep call recordings?
The published policy lists audio recordings as the sooner of 30 days, a successful offload over SFTP or FTP, or the term in your contract. Call logs are listed at 60 days.
How do I listen to a Five9 call recording?
Open the agent's user properties, go to the Recordings tab, select the recording, and click Play. It opens in your default media player, and the tab also lists number, length, campaign, creation time, and upload status.
Does Five9 record in stereo?
Mono is the default. Stereo recording exists, and a Five9 moderator has told a customer on the public forum that switching runs through the account manager and Five9 Support rather than an administrator setting.
Can CallSniper connect directly to Five9?
No. Recordings reach CallSniper by export and upload, which needs nothing from your phone platform beyond the files.
Sources
- Five9 documentation portal, read 2026-09-12: "Configuring Call Recordings" (vendor date Jul 30, 2026), "Exporting Recordings and Transcripts", "Managing User Recordings", "Configuring Advanced Recording Uploads" (vendor date Mar 20, 2025).
- Data retention policy at five9.com/legal/dataretention, read 2026-09-12. Verified from the primary source.
- Knowledge article 000015360 on recording audio compression, plus the Five9 Discussions thread "Mono to Stereo Recordings" answered by a Five9 moderator. Both read without a login.
- The REST API reference, article 000024713, and stereo articles 000028644, 000026741, and 000023030. Login required, not read, unverified.
- Every capture and the fetch record sit at evidence/five9-2026-09-12/.