Podcasting Hacks

Record Telephone Interviews HACK

Use hardware and software solutions that will give your phone interview a quality that is similar to what you would get in person.

When you can’t get face to face with your subject for financial or scheduling reasons, your best bet is to interview him over the phone. This hack covers the legal issues and gives some technical solutions to get reasonable sound quality for remote interviews.

Keep It Legal

It’s a fact of life that sometimes people will say one thing when they are being recorded and something else, probably more candid, when they are away from the microphone. In the U.S., it’s illegal to record someone, particularly over the phone, without either one-party or two-party consent. Which of these standards applies to you depends on which state you are in and where you are calling. With one-party consent, only one of the people on the line, normally the interviewer, needs to consent to the conversation being recorded. In the case of two-party consent, all the participants, and that can be more than two people, need to consent. Practically speaking, you should play it safe and always ask the person you are interviewing if she consents to being recorded. For more information on phone-recording laws, including those in other countries, check the Call Corder site ( http://callcorder.com/phone-recording-law.htm).

Handset Tap

You can record a conversation over the phone in several ways. The simplest is the handset tap. This device fits between the phone ...