Nothing illicit - we would like to start recording our weekly status meetings at my company (with the consent of all involved) - but these are conducted in a conference room using a speakerphone, with some people physically there, and others dialing in.
The speakerphone has no recording capability, and so recently we have been using a microphone placed near the speaker - but this produces poor audio quality, and a large volume differential between the people in the room, and the people on the phone.
I’m thinking there must be some kind of device I can put inline on the phone cable and plug into my computer’s line-in port that would make this simpler. Any ideas?
When I was a kid, I did this without any special device at all, just twisting the phone wire together with an audio jack and plugging it into a tape recorder. It worked, but in retrospect was probably not a good idea, considering the rather high ringer voltage on a phone line.
Here is a pretty simple looking device with a phone plug on one end and an audio minijack on the other. It would probably work on a computer mic-in.
I used to use one of the things friedo linked to when I had to tape phone calls (for journalism school). Never used it with a computer, though.
Have you considered a service like this? It uses real phones and real phone lines, there’s just a central server involved that records your calls, among other things.
When we want to do this, we use Free Conference Call - they record it free too. You pay for whatever your long-distance charges are that you normally pay to your LD co. but there’s no charge at all for the conference service. And no, you’re not calling a number in Russia or anything like that. Just regular U.S. numbers.
You can get a toll-free # too although that does cost a few cents per minute. If you use a regular number, it’s free. We’ve been using it for a year or more and still can’t figure out how they are making money. But it works great.
You can use the computer’s modem to do the recording – run the wall line to the modem’s “LINE” jack, and the speakerphone to the “PHONE” jack, so that the modem sits in series between the speakerphone and the wall.
Windows used to have a modem application that came with it… yes! HyperTerminal. You should be able to open HyperTerminal, type “ATA” (to pick up the line) and then use the speakerphone to do the dialing. A program like Audiograbber will be able to record from any sound source (including the modem!) and handles long recordings very well. I use it to record wee-hours radio shows from my tuner card, and if you have the right codecs installed it will convert the recordings to MP3 when you’re done.