low budget mic and speakers for conference calls

[kozikowski]

It will be used for the skype call

You said the magic words. Audacity and Skype do not get along on the same machine. It’s not fun when two dominant sound programs start battling over a single set of hardware resources.

We recommend software designed to “know” about Skype and how to deal with resource issues such as:

Pamela
http://www.pamela.biz/en/products/

And others:

Help Recording with a Mic, Laptop, and Headphones

There are other free Skype recorders: http://voipcallrecording.com/ http://scribie.com/free-skype-recorder http://www.ifree-recorder.com/ http://atdot.ch/scr/ Gale

Fair warning some packages do not split the near and far sound and some insist on exporting to MP3 instead of WAV. The upper two Pamela licenses, Professional and Business allow split recording and export to high-quality WAV.

Koz