#1 2009-01-12 13:02:04

**_jbischke_**

Possible to record Skype audio through Adobe Connect?

OK, this is a long shot but I thought I've asked.  We've been happy for the most part with Adobe Connect but the one area where we find it falling down consistently is audio.  With one person speaking it's pretty good but whenever you get more than a couple of people on the line it usually degrades pretty quickly.  We've had a few of our teachers use Skype to do the audio portion which work great but the problem there is that then the audio doesn't get recorded which pretty much negates the value of recording the call. 

I'm trying to figure out whether there's any possible way to have Skype audio recorded and integrated into the Adobe Connect recording.  I know there's a checkbox to "Record audio from speakerphone" so I'm thinking maybe that would work for this but I'm guessing not.

Skype isn't ideal either in that it's an extra step for the user and not everyone has Skype installed but I think some of our teachers would prefer to sacrifice a bit on the user experience front to ensure that they have rock-solid audio quality during their session.

**_Terry_at_RefinedData_com_**

Re: Possible to record Skype audio through Adobe Connect?

You can achieve this result quite easily but it does require some extra steps by each of your users and for best results requires an extra computer to pipe the audio into the meeting. The first thing you require is a standard male-to-male audio cable with 3.5mm jacks on each end. These generally cost about $10 depending on length.

You simply feed the audio from the headphone jack on a computer running Skype for the audio portion in to the microphone jack of one of the computers running as a host in the Connect Pro meeting. This allows you to essentially capture the Skype audio in your meeting recording.

Here's the problem with this solution. The Skype audio will be rebroadcast back through the VOIP connection so the users listening in Skype will hear the audio twice - once through Skype, and once through their Connect Pro meeting connection. To solve this all of the Skype users need to turn the volume of their playback to the lowest level - i.e. zero. (I warned you it was fiddly)

The result of all of this is that Skype is used for the broadcast of all microphone input but as far as Connect Pro is concerned there is only ever one speaker in the meeting (the host who is rebroadcasting the Skype audio) and this is the audio stream that everyone listens to. Since Connect Pro only has one person speaking, the audio never degrades and your recordings include all of the Skype audio.

If you want to do this without the benefit of the second computer, you can do that too. Just feed the speaker output of the Connect Pro Host computer that is acting as the bridge, right back in to the microphone jack of the same machine. In this case you need to check the box that says "Record Audio from Speakerphone".  This will suppress audio from being played back on the host box speakers from within the Connect Meeting (not from within Skype) but all audio will be recorded properly.

Let me know if that does the trick for you or if it's more trouble than it's worth.

You'll need to play around with volume and recording levels a bit to get the right balance but it should work just fine. Where there's a will, there's a way!

Good Luck,

Terry

**_jbischke_**

Re: Possible to record Skype audio through Adobe Connect?

So actually it seems like it might be easier that this.  We just simply checked the box that said "Record audio from speakerphone" and...it worked!  The only thing was that it was out of sync and I'm not sure why that would be.  I know sometimes the audio and video gets out of sync anyway so we need to test to see if that was the case here or if it's symptomatic of what happens anytime you use Skype for the audio.

If we can get this working it could be pretty big as we've found that when we are doing more "conversational" classes where more than a few people are live on audio at one time, the Adobe Connect audio is fairly crappy.  If we could give people the option to do a Skype Conference Call while at the same time still retaining a recording of the audio that would be a great win-win.

Will continue to investigate and report back!

**_dyun_**

Re: Possible to record Skype audio through Adobe Connect?

If we can get this working it could be pretty big as we've found that when we are doing more "conversational" classes where more than a few people are live on audio at one time, the Adobe Connect audio is fairly crappy

When you try to use the VoIP in these conversational settings, do you know if the attendees who are sharing VoIP have the add-in installed and have run through the Audio Setup Wizard? (see http://seminars.adobe.acrobat.com/voipsetup).

If not, this may be a cause for the audio issues you are seeing as the Add-In includes special Skype-like echo cancellation software that is not present if you are just sharing VoIP through the Flash Player.

**_vosh_**

Re: Possible to record Skype audio through Adobe Connect?

I dont know about Acrobat...
I record with SkypeCap...