The Hindu : Business : Recording Skype sessions

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jan 24, 2005

Business

Business

Recording Skype sessions

THIS EDITION of NetSpeak features a couple of tools that enable us to record skype conversations.

The peer-to-peer Net telephony program, Skype (http://skype.com/), featured in an earlier edition of this column, is increasingly becoming popular among netizens. This software, which is being used by millions of people, has become a major communication tool. It can be used for a wide range of applications such as teaching, remote interviewing and holding audio conferences of people spread across different geographical locations.

But one shortcoming of this popular product is that it does not have any built in facility for recording a conversation so that it can be used at a later stage. For many daily life situations, recording Skype sessions become essential.

For example, a journalist who uses Skype for taking remote interviews would naturally be keen to keep a record of the whole interview. Likewise, a student, who is having a Skype tuition session, would naturally like to get the session recorded. Perhaps people behind Skype may come out with a recording enabled version of it in future. Here, we will explore a simple solution for recording Skype conversations.

This author did a little research on the Net to get the details of the recording solutions already implemented by Skype enthusiasts and could spot some of them. But, unfortunately, most solutions found were difficult to implement.

Here is the link to one such solution: http://www.henshall. com/docs/ Skype% 20 Recording % 20WinXp% 20 1220 2004.pdf.

What we need is a sound recording program that can take the Skype output as its input and record it. The recording program, TotalRecorder (pointed out by a friend of NetSpeak) that can record audio from multiple sources can be deployed for this purpose. The possible recordable sources include audio from software (like Real Player/Windows Media Player), CD's and microphone.

Setting-up

Download the software (http://www.highcriteria.com/) and install it. While installing the program make sure that the "Install driver'' option is selected. Total recorder will create additional sound card drivers. After rebooting, you will find that Windows preferred devices for `Playback' and `Recording' have been changed respectively to "Playback through TotalRecorder'' and "Record through Total Recorder.''

Start TotalRecorder, enter the `Options' menu, access the option `Recording Source and parameters,' select `Software' and enable the options `Convert using recording parameters... /Record also input stream... " Now open Skype, access the `Options' tab from the `File' menu, press `Hand/Head Sets' button and select the option `Recording through Total recorder' for the box labelled `Audio In.' Log-in to the Skype network, start a call as usual. Whenever you want the conversation to be recorded, press the `Record' button available at the TotalRecorder interface.

You can save the conversation as a `.wav' file or as an MP3 file. But to save as an MP3 file you need to attach an MP3 converter on to the TotalRecorder. One conversion program that can be plugged-in to TotalRecorder is the open source product, Lame encoder (http://lame.sourceforge.net/). Both Windows DLL and executable versions of Lame can be downloaded from this link: http://www.hot.ee/smpman/ mp3/.

MrSAPO

Though most of us use only a couple of search engines, it is likely that we get more relevant results if we employ more than one service for the same query. But, due to obvious practical difficulties, no one will bother to hop from one search service to the other for each of the searches.

One solution is to have a tool that can automatically contact several search engines, in response to a search query and present the combined output on a single page.

Another possible solution is to present a generic search page interface with necessary features for querying any of the available search engines directly from the page. The search engine portal, MrSapo (http://www.mrsapo.com/) that enables you to query "80+ search engines and sources'' from a single page is an online service of this kind.

First you have to select the kind of search source from the available categories that include Basic, Weblog, News and Academic.

Now enter your query and invoke the search service of your choice from among the various services listed under the selected category.

For example, if you want a general search, select the category `Basic', enter the string and press the button meant for your favourite search engine (Google/Yahoo/A9/MSN/AlltheWeb... ). Similarly, if you want to look at only `Academic' sources, select the category `Academic,' immediately the service will show access buttons for various academic sources such as `Encyclopedia.com,' `Google Scholar,' `The free dictionary,' `Education World' and so on.

A free book on Knoppix

Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/) is a free distribution of Linux that comes on a single CD. Knoppix Linux Live CD that contains programs "such as OpenOffice.org, Abiword, Gimp, Konqueror, Mozilla, Apache, PHP and MySQL'' allows you to run a full fledged Linux system entirely from your CD. To run this system, you don't need to install anything on your hard disk.

Though such free programs are available in plenty, due to inadequate documentation/support, generally, users are unable to exploit them properly. If we have access to good guides that describe the unique features/tools of such products, we will be able to use them much more effectively.

In this regard, the free book, `Knowing Knoppix' becomes quite significant.

The book narrates the various features of `Knoppix Linux' lucidly and provides several valuable tips. If you are new to Linux, this is yet another way to start. Check out: http://www.pjls16812.pwp. blueyonder.co.uk/ knowing-knoppix/ index.html

Internet Text Archive

The `Internet Text Archive' (http://www.archive.org/texts/) is an excellent web location that hosts links to several free open source textbook digitising/ hosting projects that include `Project Gutenberg' (http://www.gutenberg.org/), `Children's Library,' `Million Books Project' and `Open Source Books.'

J. Murali

Email the author at: jmurali@gmail.com

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