How to get the best possible recording of your interviews and in turn get accurate transcripts?
Thinking about conducting interviews for your dissertation or doctoral study or you’re a budding podcaster wanting to record weekly interviews for your podcasts? One thing to keep in mind is that recording your interviews digitally is always a good way to ensure that you’ll get 100% accuracy on your transcripts. Below are some tips to ensure that you get the best possible recording of your interview:
- The first point is a very obvious one. Keep the microphone close to the mouth of the speaker, whether it’s you asking the questions or the interviewee answering
- Try to soundproof the room as much as possible, close all the windows and doors and. Public places like malls or cafeterias are always bad choices for recording your interviews.
- If you have multiple speakers, try to ask questions individually to all of them to prevent all of them jumping to answer at the same time. This prevents crosstalking and ensures higher accuracy of the transcripts.
Having a good recording ensures crisp audio quality of your interviews, which means greater audience interest. Let’s face it, everybody is impressed with quality more these days. On top of this, a good quality audio also means cheaper, faster, more accurate transcripts. It’s a win-win situation for all!
A good idea is to do some market research and invest some money in a good digital voice recorder. Most digital recorders also work as an MP3 player, so your investment won’t just be for recording only. Below are some of the market leading digital recorders that ScriptoSphere recommends.
1. Zoom H4N Handy Recorder:

Quite possibly the best professional digital recorder money can buy, the Zoom H4N is a favorite with podcasters and journalists. Since it’s a professional digital recorder, that means you also pay good money for it. It should cost you around $330 to $350, but it is the best in the market. What’s more, you can connect professional microphones to it for greater quality recordings.
2. Sony ICD-SX700 Digital Recorder

This offering from Sony has good quality microphones, and at $149, it’s a bargain for those who are not into professional audio recording, but just need it for one-time interview recordings. This can produce very good sound quality, and records in Wav format, and if you want lesser filesize, you can later convert it to MP3 using Sony’s Sound Forge software.
3. Olympus LS-10 Digital Voice Recorder

Another very good digital recorder, which claims to record every little detail. It has a 2 GB storage, and it records in WAV, MP3 and WMA formats, which is very helpful in case you don’t want to spend time later converting your WAV files into MP3. The price is a bit steep at $300, but it’s a professional grade audio recorder.
What if I want to record interviews over the phone?
We have an answer for this too!
Pamela Call Recorder for Skype
Everybody knows what Skype is. For those who don’t know, it’s a VOIP (Voice over IP) software to make calls over the internet or to any mobile or landline around the world. Their website is: http://www.skype.com. Now, Pamela Call Recorder is an extra plugin for Skype, which can record any calls made to phones all around the world or other Skype users.
This is a an extremely good alternative if you’re planning on recording your interviews over the phone. First of all, Skype is a free software, and so is Pamela Call Recorder. It records your call in a digital format, and you can save the recordings as Mp3 files, which are then much easier to upload for transcription. All the information is given on the plugin’s website: http://www.pamcorder.com. All you have to do is first install Skype, if you don’t already have it, and then download Pamela Call Recorder. If all your calls are going to be within the U.S., then it’d be a good idea to get a Skype monthly subscription package, which lets you make unlimited calls within U.S. for like $3 to $5.
We hope all this information helped you. Do not hesitate to contact info@scriptosphere.com if you need any more details. ScriptoSphere provides professional audio transcription service at an astounding $0.90 per minute for good quality audio.
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Email us for a quote: service@scriptosphere.com