recording skype conversations

My Mami (maternal aunt) mailed and said she wants to record the skype music lessons for my cousin sister. I had once recorded my mami’s and mom’s conversation and put it as a podcast. On the skype music lesson, my cousin sister who is in the first grade in the US uses skype to learn carnatic music (south Indian classical music) from a teacher in Europe! She is skilled enough to start skype and dial and have the class at the required time all on her own 🙂 Talk about 7 year olds learning technolgy!

So, here is the tutorial to record sound on your computer and convert them to mp3. In the following post, I will tell how to put it into a podcast.

Requirements: Headphones, Microphone, Software: Audacity and Lame Encoder (for mp3 conversion) and of course a bit of patience and exploratory nature to poke around the software a learn more

Step 1: Download – Audacity (free open source sound editing software) http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ {download the stable version} and also download the Lame encoder (click here) for mp3 conversions.

Step 2: Install Audacity

Step 3: Unzip Lame encoder software into a directory. I have do it at C:/Program Files/LameEncoder Do it at any place but remember the location.

Step: Open Audacity and this is how it looks. I would advice you to play around with it a bit – best way to learnany software.

Step 5: Go to Edit > Preferences and if you are not doing high quality recording lower the sampling rate to 16,000 kHz (good for interviews and general conversations). As my aunt is doing music classes I think she may go for 44,000  but I wonder if the voice quality of skype is hardly that much! And change Sample format to 16 bit if you want smaller file sizes from 32bit. Again this depends on quality.

Step 6: Click the ‘File Formats’ tab in the preferences itself and click the library button under mp3 export. Find the Lame dll – the place where you unzipped the encoder.

Change the bit rate here if you want to. I would recommend 128 usually for music but if its just conversations you may push it to 64 easily. (note:all this to reduce file size if you are concernec abut space or bandwidth)

Step 7: if you want to record conversations you will need to mix the line in and line out and let the software know this. you can choose to do what you want to do by selecting the format in the drop box in the main window. Stereo Mix or Mono Mix.

Step 8: now start your skype conversation or anything for that matter. if you want to record only your microphone input choose microphone. If you want to mix – choose mix and choose the volume of line in (speaker icon) and microphone volume. Kind of adjust the setting before hand and you are good to go!

Step 9: click file save as – will save in audacity format. If you want to save in  mp3 format – export it 🙂 now you are good to go. You may have to experiment a bit with the setting I mentioned in the steps before to get the best or optimum sound quality and size.

Step 10: BTW put the plugins if want! And also you can do multiple tracks. you can add echo, give bass boost and more stuff basically play with music like you do with photoshop! you can cut sections out make ringtones for your cell phones and then transfer via bluetooth and more …… Have fun and let me know by the comment section if you have any suggestions, comments or yeah of course doubts!

I am sure my cousin will learn this easily if given some time to play around. Imagine the power of editing sound, images and publishing – all the technology need by the big media houses at affordable prices and simplicity and mostly for free! The next generation is basically going to breed in a ‘Free Culture‘, a cut and paste culture in its true sense – learn at a massive pace and exchange and consuming media in its truest meaning 🙂 And I am glad I am going to be part of it …

Will follow up this post soon with one on how to put them on the internet and create a podcast! For people who can’t wait – I use this service and I just love it http://www.pod-serve.com/