How to Record Skype Conversations

Day 42

I remember using AIM in late 1999 for voice chat. Sure, it was a beta feature - there was some serious delay and the quality was sub par - but the feature was available none the less. So when I first fired up Skype, I didn't see what all the hype was about. I soon learned the true potential is hidden behind skype credits ,which gives the caller the ability to call ordinary phone numbers.

It's just over 2 cents a minute to call anywhere in the US, so I thought it was worth experimenting with. I purchased $10 in Skype credits and punched in my wife's cell number. Since Skype ships with the Asus Eee, I figured there would be no problems, and I was correct. The connection was clear with only occasional digital distortion.

But there's really no need to spend my credits calling my wife when my own cell phone does the trick. Instead, I wanted to see the potential in using Skype for podcasting. Phone interviews are a great way to keep a podcast interesting - if you can get a quality recording.

While recording Skype conversations in Windows is fairly easy, there are not many resources available for doing so in Linux. Googling the topic brought up many pages, but few solid answers. There were a handful of tutorials for setting up Audacity to take the Skype signal, but they were either too difficult to follow, or led to dead ends in the program settings. One tutorial gave suggestions for recording through the command line, which was a concept I simply couldn't grasp. There was even a website that detailed how to connect two laptops with a series of patch cords going to and from the microphone and headphone jacks. All these "solutions" almost made me give up on recording a Skype conversation. Until I found Skype Call Recorder.

SCR is a simple-to-use addon for Skype. When a call is placed, it saves the recording as a stereo mp3 track. The convenient thing is that the caller is recorded on the left speaker track and the callee is on the right making it extremely easy to edit (If you want to know how to edit this using Audacity, leave a comment, and I'll post a quick how-to).

Skype Call Recorder can be downloaded here as a .deb package that is specifically for the Eee, so there should be no problems installing. There weren't any for me. Just click on the link and let the Eee do the hard part.

Skype Call Recorder is great for podcasting and recording phone interviews.

Punk Rock Elmo on the Eee

Day 27

Listen to Punk Rock Elmo, recorded on the Asus Eee
Linux isn't known for its audio prowess, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of packages hidden in the repositories for those who dare try to push the limits. The most popular of course is Audacity which is typically used for podcasts and light audio editing. I wanted to put it to the test and see if it and the Asus Eee could handle recording a multi-track, musical composition.

My daughter will be a year-and-a-half by Christmas, and her life currently revolves around Sesame Street's Elmo. That furry monster is on constantly in the house and I can't help but find myself wandering around whistling the theme song. This will be my sample song. I grew up on punk rock (and it's still my guilty pleasure), so I thought I would combine the two and see what happened.

I consider myself a mediocre musician on most instruments, and although I can play the drums, I didn't have a real drumset handy, so I hunted down a copy of Hydrogen. This is a drum machine similar to the commercial product known as Fruity Loops. I installed it from a .deb package I downloaded from the Hydrogen Sourceforge site. It installed fine, but there was no program icon in the launch menu so it had to be started from the command line (simply by typing the word hydrogen). The screen sized forced me to scroll horizontally through the drum tracks, but other than being a minor irritation, this did not affect the program in any way. After I had sequenced the drums, I exported it as a .wav and moved on to Audacity.


I played with Audacity in the past, and found that the sound card on the Eee does a decent job recording one track, but once that exists, it pretty much sounds like mud for any additional tracks. I was planning on importing the drum track and then recording two guitars and a bass - four tracks total. To do this, I would have to get a bit creative.

Rather than importing the drum track into Audacity, I instead loaded it into the default Music Manager that comes with the Eee. I plugged my mic into the 1/8" jack and aimed it at my guitar amp. I was able to record through Audacity while listening to the drum track playing through the Music Manager. This way Audacity could stay at its one track recording maximum, but I still had something to follow along with.

It was a tedious process, but it worked. I repeated it with the other tracks. After each track, I did some quick track cleaning (amplified and removed noise), and then saved it as an mp3.

When all the recording was done, I imported the four tracks into Audacity and synced them up. After a bit of tweeking, it was good to go. The quality isn't fantastic, but it's a solid little recording.

Does this prove that Audacity is to the Eee what Garage Band is to the Mac? Not really. But it'll get the job done if you're will to work around the issues. And the next time you see Elmo, I hope you picture him kicking ass in a mosh pit with the rest of his muppet pals.

Audacity and LAME

Day 21

There are some intentional incompatibilities between Audacity and proprietary files formats (.wma, for example). Apparently this applies to mp3s as well because a separate file is needed in order for Audacity to export projects as an mp3, and while Ogg Vorbis is just as good, it just isn't the standard yet. LAME is needed.

On a Windows computer, installing LAME is no more difficult that downloading the file and then directing Audacity to its location. It proved to be much more difficult on Linux. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough, but I couldn't find a location to download the libmp3lame.so file Audacity was asking for (Incidentally, Windows Audacity asks for lame.dll). I decided to compile the file from source. Here's how.

1. Download the source file here.
2. Extract the files from the .zip.
3. Click into the LAME folder that was extracted, click on the tools menu, and choose “open new console window.”
4. Type sudo apt-get install build-essential
5. Type su and enter your root password when prompted
6. Type ./configure
7. Type make
8. Type make install

Following these steps caused all kinds of interesting things to happen in the console – it kind of looked like the time the cat walked across the keyboard while I was typing my masters project – but it seemed to do the trick. Sort of.

When I tried to export to mp3, it again asked me the the LAME file, and much to my chagrin, I couldn't locate it. I minimized the window and used the handy find option in the launch bar to locate the path to libmp3lame.so. Strangely, Audacity couldn't see the folder it was in, so I had to manually move it to my home directory and use it from there.

If anything, the last two days have shown me why the Eee doesn't ship with Audacity. Sure it works, but it's kind of like using a butter knife as a screwdriver. It gets the job done, but may require a bit more effort than expected.


Day 20

I have yet to remedy the recording problems I experienced while using Audacity, although to be honest, I haven't really tried to fix them. Instead, I needed to focus on editing some multi-track .aup files that some students at school recorded. It's a podcast, more or less, complete with transitions, background music, and sound effects.

I wasn't sure at first if Audacity on the Eee would even open the files since they were made on a computer running Windows XP, but it fired up right away. Sort of. I couldn't double click on the file – it would open as a text file, and I wasn't sure how to assign a program to the .aup file type. Instead, I ran Audacity and then opened the file from there. No problem.

I saw no major difference in editing between the Eee and a Windows machine other than a slight speed difference when importing new audio or adding effects, but this could be from the 512 Ram in the Eee. It had no problem, however, with playback - despite having five tracks total in the project.

When I finished editing, I saved the project, and then went to export it as an MP3. I know from experience that LAME is needed, and as expected, Audacity asked me where the file was. By now it was late, so I canceled the export and figured I would fight that battle another day.

Audacity

Day 18

I use Audacity (along with Hydrogen) to record demo tracks of songs. I haven't played in a band in over a year, but I miss playing, and I still have songs rattling around in my head. Audacity helps get those out. It isn't intended to do large-scale sound recording, but it works well with my makeshift "studio" in the basement. I also use Audacity at my school were I head up the school's "radio station." Much of this duty is spent teaching kids how to record, edit, and produce shows that are then broadcast on a short-range transmitter. It's basically a glorified podcast, but again, Audacity gets the job done.

I wanted to see how Audacity performed on the Eee, despite its limitations. Rather than turn to the console this time, I check Synaptic, and it popped right up. (I'm guessing it is included in the Xandros repos, but I may be wrong.)

Audacity has a history of hiccups on Linux machines. People, including myself, have experienced strange errors messages that made it impossible to record. Fortunately, I didn't run into this problem on the Eee. I grabbed my guitar and click on record.

Even though there's an 1/8" mic input, I decided to see how the internal microphone handled sound. It recorded well with little noise or evidence of lag (which can be a deal breaker when recording music). Everything was going well - until I tried to record another track over the first.It's visually apparent that something's not right with the second track.

Now, logically speaking, in order to recording multiple music tracks, one needs to hear them all at once. Apparently the Eee can't quite handle this, because the second track was nothing but static. When I turned off the "Play other tracks while recording new one" option, the second track sounded as good as the first, but it's useless at this point.

The verdict - I need to play with this some more. Audacity certainly works on the Eee, but not without flaws. I plan on doing some editing on Audacity this weekend, and I'm optimistic that it will go well. As long as the limitations present with recording don't emerge while editing as well.

Introduction to the Experiment

Day 1
On November 4th, while our nation was participating in a history-making presidential election, I was quietly enjoying my 27th birthday and eating cake with my family. This was also the day that I convinced my wife that I needed another laptop. When she asked why we needed a third (we also have a HP running Windows XP and a Dell with Ubuntu Hardy Heron installed) I had a simple answer - it's my birthday.

I had been following the Asus Eee PC for the past year, but could never find a way to sneak a $299 online purchase past my wife since she is usually the one who pays the bills. I had pretty much given up on the idea until I saw Target stores now carrying the 4G 900 series. Now how could I possibly sleep at night knowing there was a shelf full of these things only minutes from my house. I was sold.

That night I picked up a black model of the Asus and proudly marched it through Target. I got it home and all seemed well - it fired up right away, let me create a user name and password, and connected to my wireless with the correct WEP key. One problem - unless a well-aim sledgehammer blow was used, the enter key wasn't working. No biggie. A quick trip back to Target would remedy the problem.

Day 2
Asus #2 - Wireless is paint-dryingly slow. I know the first laptop wasn't like this, so there must be a problem. After much swearing, I decided to try one more time.

Day 3
To help curb my bad luck I decided to make Eee #3 white this time. Thank goodness Target has such a lax return policy. I spent the rest of the night cautiously exploring my new toy.

Day 4
Perhaps some background is needed here. I teach middle school English Language Arts in a semi-rural district near Niagara Falls. I enjoy using technology in my room, and I'm usually the guy other teachers go to when they need a hand with something computer related. Naturally when I brought the Eee in, my fellow teachers were immediately interested and wanted a full review. With all the problems I had already run into, I was a bit weary of giving a full report just yet. That's when I got an idea.

What if I only used the Asus Eee PC? No other computers either at home or sch0ol. Could I survive in a Windows world with a Linux machine with just over 1 GB of available space? And thus began the 100 Days with the Eee PC experiment.

Day 5
First stop - Google. I wanted to see what hidden potentials the Xandros install was harboring. It seems like many users install Eee-flavors of the 'buntu series, but I want to keep this little quest as simple as possible. Turns out Asus had the same idea. Originally they wanted to offer the Eee with two different desktop modes - easy and advanced. The advanced desktop never quite made it to the final install. There's a desktop icon in the settings menu, but it does nothing. I read that in an attempt to lessen customer service calls, Asus opted out of this option. Advanced mode still exists though - it just takes some tweaking. I found instructions on doing so here. I like it much better. It's KDE, and I'm used to Ubuntu's Gnome desktop, but there are certainly more options. I added a few shortcuts to the desktop, changed some backgrounds, and made myself a bit more comfortable. With a bit more googling I even found the needed repositories and installed audacity. It won't be lightening fast, but I do use it quite often at school with the kids, so it is necessary if my little experiment is to succeed.

Here's a screenshot of my Eee in Advanced Desktop mode.