How in the Tech

Recording Skype VOIP Calls

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 13, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Multimedia

Skype is synonymous with Internet VOIP calls around the world. Being one of the first and also one of the best goes a long way towards gaining market share, who would have thought? I’m a daily Skype user and while it comes standard with a ton of features and functionality, there is one glaring oversight. Natively, Skype is unable to record calls so that they can be archived or otherwise documented at a later date. I suspect there is some sort of legal red tape that Ebay, Skype’s now current parent company, wish to avoid; as you aren’t allowed to record traditional POT system calls without notifying both parties. At any rate, Skype does have a plugin architecture available and it is via this hook that this little limitation can be circumvented.

Skype Call Recorder is a free Windows application written atop Microsoft’s .NET framework that does just as it’s name suggests – integrates with and records Skype calls. As is typical with many applications covered here, Skype Call Recorder’s interface is brutally simple to use. Three main buttons control recording and playback; anyone that has used a media program will recognize the layout. Additionally, you are able to tweak the recording mode from mono, stereo, or joint-stereo with bitrates ranging from 32 to 128kb/s. Files are outputted in a folder of your choosing in the mp3 format – which means playback is rather universal and not proprietary!

As their website states … making a call could cost nothing to you, but the information and conversation itself could be invaluable for you, your business, and your reputation.