I am new. Is there a way to record a telephone conference call directly and so I can edit and /or post to webpage as mp3?
When I look at the Inputs drop-down list on my copy of Audacity, I see “Phone Line” as one of the items there. Does that show up for you? If it does, then maybe that might work?
If it does show up, and you select it, but it doesn’t work, I would guess that you would probably have to connect your phone line to the modem in on your system, as if you were using a dial-up internet connection.
TSC
Audacity can record whatever you can get into the computer. Transcriber probably has a voice-modem that has answering-machine functions in it. If you don’t have such a thing, then you need to capture the audio from the phone line. There are commercial devices that will plug into a phone line and do level and impedance matching to an audio input on the PC or mixer. If you have an older phone, those with a base and handset cabled together, you could capture the audio with a magnetically-coupled tap to the earphone. Radio Shack used to sell these. They may still. If you have a phone with a headset jack (like many cordless phones have), you could make a cable to connect that to the computer. It would probably need some attenuation as you are going from a near-speaker level to either a line or mic level input. There are pre-made cables for this purpose, though you will probably have to make a plug adapter that connects the earphone line of the headset plug to the attenuating cable. You can cannibalize an old headset for this. Cut the cord off and put a suitable plug on the speaker wire and short the mic wire to the shield.
You could also acoustically couple a mic with the speaker in a phone too. This could be as simple as taping the mic to the ear piece of the phone and wrapping it in a towel to minimize ambient noise being picked up.
Or my favorite trick of recording a speakerphone in a quiet room with a standalone microphone. Juggle the positioning of the microphone and speakerphone volume for good balance. This is virtually the only way to get good voice balance without mechanical surgery, ripping cables apart, or blowing the big bucks on a telephone hybrid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_hybrid
The parts at Radio Shack all universally suffer from a great imbalance between your voice and the voice at the far end. A common question is about how to boost the voice at the far end without affecting the much louder local voice. That’s what the hybrid does. A properly balanced hybrid hands you two separate audio cables, transmit and receive audio and you can do with them what you want. I’m only familiar with the big honkin’ hybrid amplifiers at the radio call-in shows, but I think they make much smaller ones.
Koz