This Call is Being Recorded
My hobby (and hopefully one day full-time job) is writing about food and wine. Magazines even pay me for this! It becomes a problem when I conduct a phone interview. I take notes, but truthfully, I take poor notes. I have always depended on recordings.
Up until recently, I used a poor-man’s recording device. I would conduct the call with two phones off the hook – one on my ear and one on an iPod with a mic attached. This always worked. My last interview, however, was with a rather soft-spoken rock star about his vineyard. So soft-spoken, it turns out, that my jerryrigged method couldn’t pick up a word he said. So I called in my Twitter friends, many of whom are podcasting/recording gurus. They ran my sound file through every piece of software and equipment they could think of. You can still barely hear my rock star. For all intensive purposes, that interview is lost.
Then my husband, an avid reader of BoingBoing, came across this post by Mark Frauenfelder. I immediately ordered the Olympus WS-110 digital voice recorder and the matching TP-7 telephone recorder. I just got around to testing them and it’s fantastic. I gave my husband a call and both ends of the conversation are clear as day.
It works by basically flipping around a headset in your ear. There is a small mic that is in your ear, but the biggest mic is facing outwards, towards where you’ll hold that phone when you put it up to your face. Because this works by basically tapping YOU and not the phone, you can use it with any phone.
The TP-7 recorder works with any recorder, I think, but I purchased the Olympus because it’s tiny, it’s USB, and it seems to have a wealth of features I haven’t even explored yet. I’ll probably use it (sans telephone recorder) at conferences.
Cheers!
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Find Michelle Lentz here on Write Technology, on Twitter, Pownce, and FriendFeed.
