Equipment to record phone calls?

DrScotsman

Recording incoming and outgoing phone calls from a landline - should be quite simple, right? Well I initially bought Truecall because it recorded calls and so much more, but the Truecall unit has an inherent fault where it disconnects calls if you try to record them :rolleyes:

Maplin sell an SD-card based recorder for £150, but that's hardly moneysaving. You can get a tape based one for £50-odd but you can only record 90 minutes on a tape, I reckon you could get something much better for that price.

I think the cheapest solution I've found is to get the standard telephone to 3.5mm jack cable, and a dictaphone with line in that starts recording when it hears noise and stops when it doesn't hear noise. You can get the latter for £25 off of Amazon (Sony ICD-B600). Only problems are no USB connectivity and no power adapter. The former isn't as important, you could still get them onto a PC quite easily, but if you add the latter on then the price of an appropriate dictaphone seems to go woosh!

Does anyone have any cheap setups that they've found work fine?

(P.S. It'd be great if for once we could not bring the legal aspects into this thread, as because a lot of people are wrong it usually derails...)

[Deleted User]

DrScotsman wrote: »

I think the cheapest solution I've found is to get the standard telephone to 3.5mm jack cable, and a dictaphone with line in that starts recording when it hears noise and stops when it doesn't hear noise.

Where are you going to plug that? Into an externasl mic input, with a sensitivity of a few millivolts?
The signalling voltage on a telephone line is 50VDC, and the ringing voltage about 200VAC, if you stuff that lot up a dictaphone you'll f*ck it in fine style. Apart from that, the audio level on a phone line is about 0dBm peak, which is likely to be too high for the mic input. If the input isn't DC isolated the dictaphone will sieze the line. Then there's impedance matching, if your dictaphone input isn't 600 ohm you'll have BT chasing up why there's a mismatch fault on the line......

(P.S. It'd be great if for once we could not bring the legal aspects into this thread, as because a lot of people are wrong it usually derails...)

Does anyone know what the legal position is?

DrScotsman

Really?

For a start, these adapters are marketed for the exact purpose of being plugged into tape recorders. I'm assuming a cheap tacky tape recorder's line/mic in wouldn't be any more protected than a dictaphone's line/mic in, so unless that assumption is wrong then surely you're basically saying these aren't actually fit for ANY purpose? Not to mention surely the adapter would just not connect to the ringing pin?

EDIT: Maybe I wasn't clear when I said cable. There's a little black box which I presume brings the voltages down to a reasonable level, like so

Secondly, I have since actually bought a dictaphone for this purpose...except I haven't used it, as the day before it arrived I discovered that my iPod's line out is also a line in! You just need Rockbox or iPod Linux to use it (already had Rockbox). I've tested it out and it's recorded calls just fine (including one incoming). And it isn't very loud or anything, with the exception of some popping when an incoming call is received.

The legal position is that you can record calls between you and someone else (without their consent) so long as you don't disclose them to a 3rd party. Tapping may be illegal, but this isn't tapping.

Mark_In_Hampshire

Another alternative might be to use a VOIP based solution where the software records the call to a file on your computer.