I’d love to call more people and talk to them about blockchainy stuff for the blog. (No, no podcast for now. Just the surprisingly effective journalistic judo trick of talking to people.)
I have an Android phone and tablet. The sound quality is eminently usable, and I have Skype to call people on!
How on earth do I record it?
There appears to be no standard option. Skype itself has no facility for recording calls. There are assorted extremely dodgy apps that claim to do the job, none of which I want to go near.
I can Google for dodgy apps as well as you can — I’m not asking you to do a quick Google for me. What I want to know is — has anyone reading this done this personally, recording a Skype call on Android? How do you do it? What do you use? What are the caveats?
(Last time I had to do this, I did it on a Linux desktop — I had to run Audacity capturing the microphone and Audio Recorder capturing the speaker, then put the two recordings together. Hideous and stupid and I don’t want to do that again.)
Update, June 2018: I solved this with a decent headset usable on my PC — so not on Android, sorry — and Open Broadcaster Software. Hooray!
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As you know, I’m a reasonably technical Linuxy sort of bloke.
The solution that’s worked best for me is a four-track recorder (Tascam DR-40), two internal microphones for me, two channels fed off a headphone splitter for the other party, mix in a few minutes in Audacity.
It’s distressingly analogue but it works every time. These days, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.
Samsung Android sound quality is really good these days, but it’s mono. The stereo tempts me a whole lot, because it makes transcription so much easier, particularly with multiple interviewees. (I’ve done a lot of transcription in the past.) I remember one I did on one of the four-track cassette portastudios that were popular in the day, that came out amazingly transcribable because I didn’t bother reversing the DBX compression …