Recording Phone Calls

I've just started to record some phone calls to prevent misquoting my interview subjects. To be safe and follow the law no matter where I'm calling, I have chosen to just ask everyone up front if I can record them.

I don't know if it was my pregnancy brain or what, but it took me forEVER to figure out what doo-hickeys I needed for what and in what order I had to plug the aforementioned doo-hickeys in... it seemed far too complicated!

But I did it and here's my 'secret'...

Plenty of trips to “The Source” complete with two or three returns of products, new phones bought and returned… little doo-hickeys bought and returned and THEN a trip to the pawn shop to buy a proper digital recorder.

So here’s the deal.

I have a thingy that turns one phone jack into three. It’s not a two-line jack, this is important, it must make that one jack have three inputs on the same line… you could do it with a two-jack, but my fax is also plugged in there, so I went with three…

Then my phone is plugged into it. Just a regular phone… I chose one that has speaker phone or a headset option… I always talk on a headset because it’s better for my neck (old horse training injury, lol).

Then I bought this ‘micro telerecorder’ thingy. I liked it because it came with two sizes of ‘male parts’ (oh the jokes are endless….) so it might fit different recording devices if needed…

I plug the ‘micro telerecorder’ into one of the three jack spots, right next to the one my phone is plugged in to.

Then came the hard part… finding the recorder. I had a microcassette recorder AND an iRiver MP3 player… both record audio BUT here was the part that I didn’t get until a couple of trips to the Source… neither had a microphone jack. Both of them had an external mic, so there was no way to plug the ‘micro telerecorder’ in to record the audio coming from the phone line.

So I hunted around until I found this handy-dandy ‘digital voice recorder’ at a pawn shop. I was fortunate and some dummy left an hour of some interview on there… I now know more than I’d like to know about the management practices of the Saskatchewan Roughriders… someone in that office is a raving jerk… and swears like a sailor… but ANYWAYS….

So I plug one of the male ends of the ‘micro telerecorder’ into the digital voice recorder. And then that’s it.

When I want to record, I take the recorder out of it’s little cradle (because there’s lots of feedback on the recording if I leave it to record while on the cradle) and press record.

Apparently I can download the audio files to my computer as well, but I haven’t figured that part out yet. It has a female part of a USB port… and I have a USB cable that I can hook up to it… but I haven’t tried to download anything yet… perhaps I should try with Mr. Saskatchewan Roughriders and send it to them… hehe… I haven’t deleted that off the recorder yet.