Some people with early laptops may have found the Replay Telecorder option I proposed in Part 1 an unsuitable choice. So I've been doing a bit more experimenting. I've found it possible to record Skype conversations using my old Dell Inspiron 8200 which offers fairly unsophisticated audio controls. Some of what follows may be useful for those of you in a similar situation. The key concept is to set the Stereo Mixer as the recording device and not the microphone. You then select playback devices to feed the Stereo Mixer, one of which needs to be a microphone. And here's the gotcha! … early laptops may not provide an option to select a microphone as a playback device. Here's the workaround which worked for me.
- Double click the volume control (the speaker icon) in the Task Bar to open up Windows sound mixer.
- In Options>Properties select the Recording option.
- Tick both Stereo Mixer and Microphone in 'Show the following volume controls'.
- Select Stereo Mix and set the volume slider half way up
- In Options>Properties select the Playback option.
- Select Master Volume, Wave, and Line In
Some early audio drivers didn't provide a Rec control in the playback mixer which is necessary when Stereo Mix in selected as the recording source, i.e. playback sources are fed to the mixer. But … we can use Line In instead of Rec in this configuration.
I found I got good results recording Skype dialog using this technique.
Caveats
- A powered microphone input is necessary when using Line In as a recording source; a standard headset microphone won't do. So if you can find a powered microphone or headset then that should do the business. I would borrow one first just to make sure it works for you.
- Don't use the standard Windows Recorder. I found an early version of CoolEdit worked fine. WinAmp, or similar, may also do the business, but I haven't tried that.
- Adjust the Wave setting on the playback side of your audio mixer if you find Skype sound levels are too high and leading to distortion.
Hope you find this works for those of you with limited sound controls on your Windows systems.
But there's apparently even more alternatives. For example, users of the open source Audacity or who have access to two computers may find this article in the Things that make you go hmm blog interesting.
