Some folks in Macworld’s OS X forum are scratching their heads about how to record telephone conversations in Panther. The couple of people who’ve tried have encountered more-than-distracting hum and background noise. For help I turned to two folks who do this kind of thing on a regular basis.
Those two are hosts of two Macintosh-focused Internet radio shows — Shawn King of Your Mac Life and Gene Steinberg of Mac Nightowl Live.
Shawn reports that in his early days of online broadcasting (before he had the budget to hire professional audio engineers to do the job), he’d use a speakerphone and point a microphone at it. He cautions that if you go this route, you use a full-duplex speakerphone — one that ensures that the voice on the other end of the line isn’t muted when you talk over it.
Gene offers similar advice. He uses a high-grade speakerphone, a microphone, and an OctiVox Clear Call a $180 device that maximizes the audio output of the call so it’s suitable for broadcast. Gene suggests that if you’re willing to use a go-between device for recording conversations, you visit Ahern Communications’ site.