• Publisher : Hot Recorder
• Platform : Windows
• Download : Download
• Cost : $14.95
• Star Rating : 7 out of 10

One of the most popular questions from people using a voice over IP solution (VOIP), such as Skype, GoogleTalk etc, is “How do I record my conversation?”. Now why would someone want to do this? One of the main reasons, especially if you are a podcaster is that you want to capture a conversation for later inclusion in your podcast. Another reason and one that I’ve needed software like this for, is when doing telephone interviews, which later form the basis of an article. I’ve investigated many solutions and some of them provide a myriad of features, but the majority of the time people just want to record a conversation and nothing more. For this reason I narrowed my search down to HotRecorder/VOIP.

Upon installing the application, you are greeted by a very non standard looking Windows application, that takes up a relatively small amount of screen real estate. The screen has several tabs, that separate the programs functionality into the following areas.

Recorder
This is where you’ll initiate your recordings. As well as the normal record, pause and stop buttons, you’ll also see the audio source you are capturing.

Player
All the recording you make appear under this tab. You can play any one of them, search for a specific recording made and also send a recording to a friend.

Options
There are several preference you can select change here. The destination folder; the quality of the recording (high medium and low) and whether to record in stereo or mono.

Voicemail
Have HotRecorder answer your VOIP calls with a pre-recorded message and record the incoming message. You can also select to have an email message sent to you notification when a message comes in and optionally have the message included in the email.

Emotisounds
Whilst recording conversations you can inject 1 of 15 sounds into your conversation, to add just a little atmosphere.

HotRecorder has built in support for the following VOIP solutions: Skype; Aim; Yahoo Messenger; Net2Phone; FireFly and Google Talk. You can switch between them by right clicking on the icon in the system tray. One of the things I love about this program is it’s simplicity. From downloading the app to testing it on the “Echo123″ Skype Test Call service, I think the sum of 5 minutes elapsed, not bad going.

To really put the application to the test, I waited until I had to undertake several telephone conversations. In fact I did 3 calls in total, each one being around 20 minutes. HotRecorder performed faultlessly. For recording it uses it’s own ELP format. I imagine these aren’t too different to MP3 recordings as the file length isn’t too dissimilar. The only blip I had is when one of the conversations was being saved and I decided to check out a website until the file was complete. When I flipped back to HotRecorder the whole application appeared as a blank screen. I’ve seen this a few times and know it’s usually down to the program being so maxed out it can’t update the screen. This was borne out when I decided to just leave the file saving and sure enough it eventually completed.

As I never know what machine I am going to be writing an article on, I decided it was best to convert the conversations from the proprietary ELP format to the more popular MP3 format, which I did using the included utility. Whilst the sound quality remained consistent, the two sides of the conversation were out of sync, which proved quite confusing. Fortunately I managed to revert back to the native format recordings to complete my article, but it’s a little troublesome if MP3 format recordings are a necessity.

Conclusion : For anyone needing a simple tool, that records a Skype or other supported VOIP programs conversations, this is definitely worth a try.