Audacity Forum

I want to record phone interviews using Skype. I just read an article and then watched a video that said that you needed Pamela is order to split sky out into two tracks and get the right kind of file into Audacity for editing. However, the article and video were a bit dated, so I am wondering if that is still true? In other words, I am wondering if you need Pamela to use with Skype and then you import it into Audacity for final editing/mixing? Is that the typical way things are done.

As you can tell, I'm a complete newbie, so if you guys have a tutorial on the above - I didn't see it in the tutorial section - then I would love to read it!

NOTE: I have Audacity 2.0.5. and I installed about 2 weeks ago.

You never needed Pamela to record Skype. You could use Total Recorder and there were a couple of freebies out there such as http://atdot.ch/scr/. The problem is that in order to recommend anything, we have to have multiple people use it and it has to be stable and bullet-proof and ideally, produce two different sound channels, one local and one foreign.

Pamela, particularly in the Business and Professional versions fills that bill quite nicely. The referenced product above is experimental on Windows. Would you like to test it for us?

The only time I ever produced a Skype recording, I did it with two computers.

So that's the problem. Skype configures the computer's sound channels and it's not easy to get around it without either messing up the recording or Skype itself. Computers have two natural sound channels, record and play. Skype uses both of them, full stop.

We are, oddly enough, compiling a list of available options and may publish when we get it into a graceful form. No tutorial, though.

You should probably try the obvious Stereo-Mix trick. A very short list of people turn that on and it just starts working. I think you can get that from a YouTube tutorial. One of the posters here did that and I'll look for his thread.

Koz

This is his podcast. Apparently, the two people are several US states apart and he's using nothing particularly out of the ordinary other than Stereo-Mix. More as I find it.
http://reellife.podomatic.com/entry/201 ... 2_08-07_00
Koz

Here's the post.
http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 46&t=71673

Koz

There is one other problem with recording Skype. The instant anyone gets a recording technique to work they vanish in a theatric, Disney-like "pop" and we never hear from them again.

"Very cool. So how did you do it?"

[silence]

Koz

I'm in it for the long haul. Let me check out the new product. Stay tuned..

I am sorry, but I can get permission to install that. I may not even be able to get Pamela. If something changes, I'll get back to you...

For the record, I don't think anybody has ever posted that they thought Pamela didn't work right or was a bad buy. We did have one post that had machine damage which was affecting everything and one or two postings complaining about the intentional shortcomings of the two lower Pamela licenses. From the top of my head: restricting recording time and missing export functions. I don't remember exactly.

Corporate environment? There is a sticky way around that. I had a machine on one of the hardware workbenches that did nothing but sit on Skype calls as a voice-less lurker -- that happened to record. It would capture all the "far" calls and didn't have to worry about its own voice -- because it didn't have one. Getting a test machine was far easier than getting "unauthorized" software.

Koz

This might be out of range considering you will need a couple of different items that you may or may not have. If I understand the question correctly then you just want to record the audio of the skype conversation. If this is correct then you will simply need to run an 1/8" cord out of the speaker output on your computer to a mixer and run one channel to some speakers so you can hear the conversation, and another into the mic input on your computer so you can record into audacity. Simple, if you have the equipment.