How To Record A Call On Your iPhone, Mobile Or Cellphone For A Podcast

I have spent a lot of time scouring the web for ways to record a phone conversation for the podcast. There are lots of complicated answers, some involving soldering irons or expensive cables and it has taken a while to discover it’s much easier than I thought, so I’d like to pass that on.

In the past I plugged a audio lead into the phone’s headphone socket and ran that into the mixer. This neglected the microphone part, so the phone had to just sit next to me while I shouted into the receiver and hope they caller heard me, interrupting the flow on conversation and putting background noise into the mix, but I didn’t know how to get a signal into the phone. I knew it could be done, because the headphones you get with a phone have little microphones in them, but thought I’d need some kind of fancy adapter.

The good news is you don’t. You don’t need a Skype headset or anything like that, you can use your regular microphone and your trusty old headphones. If you’re podcasting using a mixing desk or a sound card that has an audio output and audio input sockets and a phone with a headphone socket that lets you talk through an earpiece, you can can record a conversation, and your caller will head everything you hear, whether it’s music, jingles, sound effects, or anything, just like they are part of the podcast in the studio.

Most headphone sockets have two sections, a left and a right. If you look at the mic and headphone jack that comes with your phone, you’ll see it has three sections – for left, right and mic. So here’s the secret – most digital cameras and even analogue camcorders come with a lead that works perfectly well for recording phone calls while broadcasting through the phone’s mic, because camera cables have jacks which also have three sections – for left, right and video. It doesn’t matter that you’re not using video. The video out part of the cable will carry the audio out. Crazy, I know.

True, the cable outputs are normally RCA or phono jacks, but you can pick up a RCA to headphone adapter for about 50p off ebay or Maplin or Radio Shack. If you have a RCA inputs in your desk, you don’t even need the adapters. The left and right plugs will be white and red audio and the mic is the yellow one.

Plug the left and right jacks into your desired line in – or just the left one if your desk can carry a mono input, because phone calls are not made in stereo anyway – and plug the mic into your headphone socket. The headphone carries a signal out of the desk and when fed into the mic, your caller is hearing everything from the mixer output. Hey presto, you’re talking into a microphone through your mixer or computer sound card over the phone.

Getting Fancy
There is one slight complication. Your caller might be able to hear an echo on what they say. This won’t be picked up on the recording, but it could be distracting for them. Because what they are saying is going into the desk, and everything in the desk is being send back to them through the mic to their phone earpiece.

The way around this is to send them an auxiliary signal which doesn’t include the phone input. You can do this by tweaking the desk a number of ways. You need to assign an signal out that doesn’t have the phone left and right audio input going to it. I have a monitor send channel and I turn down the monitor send output on the phone input channel.

Desk are all different, but if yours allows you to do this, it may be called Auxiliary Send, Studio Return, or Effects Output. Just make sure that you send every audio signal apart from the phone input to that. Then make sure that you plug the phone mic cable into a headphones socket or general desk out.

Then you check your levels, make sure the caller is comfortable with everything and you’re made.

Total cost? Less than a pound for the RCA to headphone adapter. Maybe a little more for a camcorder cable if you don’t have one. Plus your phone and mixer and mic, but if you’ve stumbled up this from google then I’m guessing you have these already.

Now all you need is a show.

Legal Notice
Make sure your caller knows you’re recording the call. Privacy laws make this a legal requirement in a lot of countries. In the US it varies from state to state, but you should always let them know you and make sure the caller knows why, even if only out of politeness.