Recording Phone Interviews For Your Site

You have probably come across web sites which have audio recordings of phone interviews. These interviews are a great way to learn from an expert or knowledgeable person about specific topics which may interest your site visitors.

Some people attempting to do these interviews run into problems:

• poor quality recordings
• awkward equipment setup

Connecting The Phone

There are devices which mount a suction cup to the headset of a phone to record the conversations. I would not recommend these because the quality of the sound suffers.

Besides it is much easier to do than that.

I use the device shown here:

This has a 2 way phone splitter. The phone plugs into one socket, while the other line goes directly into a tape recorder.

The clarity on this is crystal clear because it is a direct signal going into your tape recorder.

You can get one of these two way phone splitters here for $18 (plus shipping):

http://www.recordersplus.com/ctrd/ctrd_home.html

You can also try ebay and search for "phone recording". You can likely pick it up for less money there.

Recording The Conversation

I strongly prefer to use a digital tape recorder. The model I have is the Olympus DS-2000

I picked mine up on ebay for about $125 but you may be able to do even better. There are other digital recorders out there so you may want to research a bit to see which ones are good for you.

The phone connector above plugs right into the MIC (line in) plug on the top of the recorder.

It is as simple as making the call and pressing record.

Converting The Conversation

When you have recorded the conversation, downloading it to your computer is very easy.

The Olympus recorder has a USB connection. When it is plugged into your computer, the Olympus program starts up and transfers it to your computer in the Olympus "dss" file format.

The Olympus files need to be converted to a WAV file. This is accomplished with the Olympus software included with the recorder.

Lower Cost Option

You may be able to record audio directly through the sound card on your computer. If you look at where your speakers plug into your computer, you may see a "Mic" or "Mic In" socket. You would then plug in the telephone device into this.

Windows comes with a "Sound Recorder" program which your sound card might work with. You should check the documentation of your particular sound card to be sure.

If you are going to go this route, make sure you test it thoroughly before you actually record an interview in the way. You don't want some unpleasant surprise like the program stopping 5 minutes into the interview!

Regardless of what route you go, you want to save it into a WAV file or another compatible file format.

Putting The Audio On Your Site

You can then save your WAV file directly to your web site to be listened to or you can convert into a variety of different programs to other file formats.

Because WAV files are so big, you should definitely consider putting it in another format.

I use Camtasia Studio to convert my audio into a Flash SWF file. This compresses it tremendously. For example:

15 Minute WAV file = 19MB
15 Minute SWF (Flash) file = 1.08MB

There are also programs to convert WAV to MP3 files if you want also. MP3 is much smaller than WAV files as well.

Things To Keep In Mind

• Which ever recorder you get, make sure that you can add additional memory to it. The recorder you buy will specify how much time it can save on its included memory card.

A 64MB Smartmedia card can record up to 20 hours and that is certainly plenty for my uses.

• Use fresh batteries when recording an important interview. No explanation necessary for that one!

It really is amazing what you are able to accomplish with the right tools. Between recording the interviews and converting them to a good web format, the process is pretty simple.

This is a great way to add content and value to your site's offerings.