Recording your interviews

So I’ve been a bit busy, but I’ve made a new promise to myself and to you the readers to get something up here every week about podcasting.

Awhile back I downloaded Skype…and it sat there collecting dust. Well not really but you get the idea. I did nothing with it. Finally I shot off an e-mail to someone that said they wouldn’t mind being interviewed. Sure they’d love to be interviewed. Luckily they were busy, so I was allowed a bit of time to prepare for the interview. The first order of business was to figure out how to record from Skype.

I found very little options for recording. Especially free options. The one option that I did find was from 2004 and it gave me hope that Skype had been upgraded and would now seamlessly record podcasts. That was not the case.

So interview night arrived and I was fumbling around like a total amateur. Oh wait…I am an amateur. Luckily the person I interviewed was also a computer person and helped me out a bit. After a bit of searching he was able to come up with SoliCall. SoliCall not only records conversations it is also supposed to reduce the noise on the call, which is an added bonus!

SoliCall is a very small program that you download and install. Once you have installed SoliCall you need to set up your Skype (or whatever program you use) so that it uses SoliCall for audio rather than the defaults that are setup. In the process of setting up SoliCall they will give you instructions on how to setup various programs. Despite setting up Skype the way they described I was not able to chat with my interviewee. After a bit of time I figured out that once I started the call I would no longer be able to talk. A work around that I found was to un-plug the microphone and plug it back in. Then I was in business.

So once we got SoliCall setup we were onto the interview which I was not prepared for. Next time I will talk about what needs to happen for an interview: