Recording a Telephone Conversation

[TIMEKEEPER]

Question for my PT pals, I need to record a series of telephone conversations and then edit them in PT. Does anyone know of a device that I can use to tap into the telephone signal in order to record into PT?

[jgerdt]

Hey, I've done some recording for teachers at the college here for their classes over the phone while they've been on the road. We have an old piece by Genter, called a hybrid coupler. Don't know if you can find another one or not, but it has 1/4" plugs for send and receive and the same for the phone signal. Seemed to work fine for us.

Jason Gerdt
Northland Recordings
Northland Baptist Bible College
[email protected]

[Icabod]

If you are not trying for high fidelity, you could try what I did.
I have a phone that has a jack for a headset. I bought an adapter to go from the jack in the phone (3/32" I think) to a 1/8" stereo jack. From that, I used a "Y" cable with left and right RCA plugs on one end to the 1/8" plug on the other. One side is for the mic, one side is for the speaker.
Even with all of the adapters, it didn't sound too bad. It wasn't broadcast quality, but depends on what you are trying to do.

[johnnyreno]

There are a slew of boxes on the market for doing this very thing. Gentner has been sold to someone I believe but there are still many of their boxes available via Ebay. Try going here:
jkaudio.com

or here:

bswusa.com

[orage]

Rat Shack sells a device that allows you to tap and record phone calls. Fairly cheap, and pretty lo-fi if I remember correctly...

[drguitar]

yea, I'm about to record a phone conversation or 2 for a documentary I'm working on with a box from radioshack....it surely sounds like a lo-fi phone conversation, but in our case we're fine with that because it's a documentary....and the box gives good signal, it's not really all that, check it out and return if unhappy

[Gaurang Arora]

Here's how I managed one assignment I got:

I connected 2 telephone cable to the main wire in a Y fashion. One end was connected to the phone instrument and the other in the Modem input socket of my G4.

I asked the 2 people to start off the conversation.

Using ZTerm, i gave a command to the modem to go off hook. The entire conversation could now be heard through the inbuilt speaker.

Next, i attached a cable from the G4 Audio out to 2 analog inputs of the 001.

The quality I got was outstanding.

This of course was done on PT5.1 on OS9. I don't know whether ZTerm has an update for OSX