Sometimes you need to record a telephone call, e.g. when you do a interview via phone and create an audio-blog afterwards. The Skype Call Recorder is a simple program to do this, it is a little tool to record the audio of your Skype calls. It’s licensed under the GPL and the author created packages for all mayor Linux distributions. He offers package sources for Ubuntu/Debian too, but the packages are not signed, so better stick to the .deb files.

After you installed Skype Call Recorder you’ll find an entry inside “Applications -> Accessories” to start the program. When you start Skype Call Recorder the first time while Skype is running, Skype will ask if you permit Skype Call Recorder to access the Skype-API. Of course you have to allow this.

The recorder doesn’t have a “full” GUI. After you started the tool, it will show up inside the GNOME panel as an icon. When you start or receive a call within Skype, the Recorder will ask you if you like to record the call. If you do this, you will find the recording as .mp3-file inside the directory “~/Skype Calls”.

You can reach the settings when you click with the right mouse button on the panel icon of the Skype Call Recorder. Here you can set rules for your contacts, so that the recording starts automatically when you call this contact, you can change the location where the program stores the recordings or adjust the file format to your need. I prefer Ogg Vorbis with “Quality 3″ and Mono.