Recording phone conversations legally

[Larry Kart]

Having been out of this part of journalism for many years, I'm sure there are now better ways than the old days to record telephone interviews with people who have of course been informed that you're doing this and then transfer the files directly to your computer (say to I Tunes). Any recommendations? Way back when, we used to carve them in stone tablets.

[AllenLowe]

two orange juice cans with an extremely long piece of string?

[GregK]

Use Google Voice. You can record the conversation and have it online as it happens. Not sure how you do anything with the file after that, though.

[Larry Kart]

Apparently with Google Voice you can only record incoming calls. I would need to record outgoing calls and then be able to store them on my computer.

[papsrus]

Substitute a hand-held digital recorder for the old tape recorder you have kicking around your desk drawer, proceed as you would have in the stone age (put phone on speaker, etc).

I'm sure there are better technologies, but this is what the scribes I work with seem to do. Plus you can use it in the field as you would a tape recorder.

[Christiern]

I needed to record an interview with Bob Wilber last month, so—not having initiated a phone interview in quite a while—I looked for a little device that I had bought at Radio Shack a few years back. I couldn't find it, so it occurred to me that this should be easy to do with a computer.

I Googled and came up with: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-to-record-skype-conversations.html

Then I signed up for a free Skype account and it was a breeze. I could play back, fast forward/rewind and even ran the result through Dragon for a text transcript.

Now, if only there was an app/machine that could write my liner notes.