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Having paid a high price in terms of time and effort to capture audio packets for purposes of recording phone interviews, I figured there had to be a better way. There was.

I am already a PhoneGnome owner and user (1, 2), and consultant to the company. I dropped a note to friend and founder of PhoneGnome, David Beckemeyer, pointing to my hardcore way of capturing audio for podcasts. Within 24 hours, David wrote back: “Dial **732, followed by the number you want to dial. When you hang up, your recorded audio will be waiting for you on my.phonegnome.com”.

No packet sniffers, no godawful softphones (read: O Lord, deliver us from PC audio), no OS software shims to capture bidirectional audio, no new billing relationship that I don’t want. Just my plain old telephone handset and my existing IP voice service.

So how does this work? I use long distance provider Voxee in conjunction with PhoneGnome, so long distance phone calls are automatically routed over IP from my home, where PhoneGnome can save the media as it goes by. But it works for local calls, too, by simply dialing those as ten digit calls, thereby forcing them over IP. At $0.011/min long distance rates, I can afford this.

Implicit in all this is that if a call is deemed “local” by PhoneGnome, PhoneGnome passes it straight through to the Gnome PSTN port, and the call travels over the PSTN, out of view of any IP infrastructure. But by dialing a podcast target as ten digits, I therefore have the option of doing recorded phone interviews with a local or long distance called party.

Thanks, David!

Update 7/15/2005:   **687 is now implemented in PhoneGnome. It’s a Note to Self function, which can be used for producing podcasting monologues over the phone.

[tags]voip podcasting,podcasting,phonegnome,phonecasting[/tags]