Skype, as you probably already know, is a wonderful online call-and-chat tool. You load up the software, dial up a contact and, without paying a penny more to the telephone company, you can natter away for hours on end. What you may be unable to do, however, is record that conversation. Not easily, anyway. Unless, that is, you happen to be using Pamela.

I first came across Pamela when I needed some way of recording an interview with someone who happened to be on the west coast of America while I was here at home in the South West of Britain. We had arranged to talk to one another using Skype and in my innocence I had assumed that Skype would have some simple way of recording our conversation. It didn’t. After a few attempts at using various recording utilities I had got precisely nowhere. Then I did a bit of Googling - and that led me to Pamela - a dedicated Skype recorder. Finally, everything worked…

Pamela creates a list of all your calls so that you can quickly review them and play them

When you call someone from Skype or when someone calls you, Pamela detects the connection and lets you click a button to record your conversation. It automatically pops up a message on the other person’s PC to let them know that you are recording (a legal requirement in many countries). When you’ve finished, it saves the recording to disk as a WAV file and (if you have downloaded the appropriate free codecs) it then auto-converts what may be quite a large WAV file to a much smaller MP3.

While the basic operation of Pamela is straightforward, the software also provides several optional features which may be specifically enabled. For example, you can enable Pamela ‘voicemail’ so that Pamela acts as a computerised answering machine which records incoming messages in your absence. Incoming calls may be greeted by a default pre-recorded ‘answer’ message or you can use Pamela to record your own message. Alternatively you can reply to incoming calls with a text message when you are not available or when you are busy. The Professional edition allows you to schedule Pamela features so that, for example, the voicemail is automatically activated at certain times on certain days.

Pamela acts as a Skype answering machine. You can write a text message or record an audio message to be sent to callers when you aren't available to answer the call

In Pamela Professional you can optionally record two separate sound streams - one containing your local input (the ‘microphone’), the other containing the remote audio (‘Skype’) and you can adjust the volume of each stream independently.

The Professional edition also lets you make microphone recordings when you aren’t connected to Skype and it can automatically upload these to a Blog. This is particularly useful if you publish an ‘audio Blog’ or podcasts. It has to be said that the Blogging and podcasting features take a bit more setting up than ordinary Skype recording. You will need at least a basic familiarity with uploading files by FTP, and, depending on which Blog you use (be it a ready-to run one such as Blogger or a self-hosted one such as WordPress), you may also need to tweak a fair number of configuration options - some of which can be daunting if you aren’t used to doing this kind of thing! Finally, you need somewhere to host your recordings (not all Blogging services provide hosting for audio files).

While Pamela generally performs well, I did have one problem. Initially, when the MP3 codecs were installed, my recordings become quite ‘jumpy’. In particular, the local (microphone) side of a conversation tended to break up quite badly. After discussion with Pamela’s developer, I decided to try out alternative versions of the MP3 codecs. For some reason, some versions (in my case, the final release of the Lame Encoder 3.96) cause problems whereas others work fine. For licensing reasons the MP3 codecs have to be downloaded separately (for example from: http://www.free-codecs.com/) so, if you encounter audio problems, you may want to experiment with different versions.

Overall, Pamela is an extremely useful Skype recorder and voicemail tool. In fact, now that I’ve started using it regularly, I can’t think how I ever managed to do without it!

Huw Collingbourne

January 2006