Hello all!

I'd like to announce "Skype Call Recorder", a small tool for recording your Skype calls on linux. I've had this little pet project for roughly a month now and today I added the last features and fixes that were on my todo list, so I thought I'd give it some publicity.

Visit http://atdot.ch/scr/

Quick feature overview:

• Record calls to MP3, Ogg Vorbis or WAV files
• Start/stop recording at any time (via systray icon)
• Choose between three modes: Automatic recording, ask every time, manual recording
• Allow this mode to be set individually for different callers
• Mono or stereo recording (in stereo mode, local and remote end will be on separate channels)
• Completely free, unlimited and open source, released under the GNU GPL

I hope you find it useful.

Im most interested in this, but I cant get it installed. I would be most grateful if someone could .deb package this for Linux noobs like me.

First it seems I need "cmake". When I got that from the repositories (ubuntu hardy), it complained I needed 2.4.8 while I had 2.4.7.. Spent a while trying to find a newer version and how to install it. Then I get some error and I figured I needed to install the packages you mentioned.

Then I got an error about a missing "CXX compiler". I tried installing the openc++ package which cured that error. Now it complains it can't find lame though its definitely
installed.


Sometimes I think Linux just isnt made for human beings

I never did .deb or .rpm packages before, so I'm happily taking any hints about how to do this from someone that knows (using gentoo myself). But I wouldn't be able to test it though.

Yes, unfortunately cmake 2.4.7 and older don't know about Qt's DBus, so they won't work. Even in Gentoo, version 2.4.8 is marked unstable. Not an optimal situation, I know.

You need a C++ compiler to compile this program. The canonical choice for this is of course GCC. On Ubuntu it seems C and C++ are separated, so you need the g++ package. (LLVM works too though, but you don't want that.)

It seems the 'lame' package on Ubuntu really only installs a binary, no library. Thus you need to install 'liblame-dev' which will also pull in 'liblame0' as dependency.

I know, sometimes the will to learn is required to get along with linux. Especially in the situation that I'm throwing a program at you that you have to compile yourself. I'll definitely consider making this easier for people like you.

Here's a list of packages that I think might be required on Ubuntu for this to compile properly. I haven't tested and don't even know Ubuntu well.

libqt4-dev
liblame-dev
libid3-dev
cmake (at least 2.4.8)
g++

The only problem is cmake, since the hardy version is 2.4.7.

Let me know how it goes.

Thanks, with that the installation went smooth and it seems to be working. Excellent stuff. I'll test more and report back.

Played around with it for a bit, and I'm impressed. It works very well, has a sleek interface and nice features. Installation is a bit of a pain for a noob like me, and required me to install 3 gazillion packages and dependencies on my fairly fresh Ubuntu Hardy, but the program is really excellent!

Haven't tested conference calls yet, so I'm not sure if or how that works or how it works with the stereo left/right thing, but so far I love it, and I can only think of 2 features that I would also like to see included:
- support for ogg format
- video support

(and a .deb package for ubuntu noobs )

Perhaps adding SMS functionality (or merging your app with Skype essentials or whatever its called) would also make it even easier and even more desirable.

But thanks for making this, I'm really really happy with it!

I'm glad it worked for you now. I digged into the world of .deb packages and creating one isn't much of a pain, once you know the basics. I created one now and it's available on the page, you might want to try it. Since it's precompiled, it won't need the '-dev' packages anymore and neither g++ or cmake. There's still a problem: I tested it with a Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD and it refused to install lame (a required dependency) unless I enable 'multiverse'. After reading what that is in the first place, I'm surprised lame is in that category, but in any case, it needs to be enabled for the package to install.

At the time of this writing, the .deb package is newer than the 20080522 snapshot, it features a desktop entry, so it should appear in your KDE or Gnome menu automagically (hopefully).

Thank you.

It seems to work well, even though the program knows nothing about conference calls. The only catch is that the file name will look like if it would have been a normal call. I'm unsure about what file name to give to conference calls. Listing all participants might be unpractical, especially since participants might join and leave the conference at any time.

Oh, that was on my original todo list, but I removed it because the reason was more that I like OGG Vorbis rather than it would be a required feature. The bad thing about OGG Vorbis is that while it's a great format, very few people know it. In the last few years I realized that going back to rip my CDs to MP3 instead of OGG Vorbis is more rewarding, because MP3 can be taken anywhere and played everywhere without having to install additional software. The inconveniences weren't worth the extra saved bytes for me. So I might add OGG Vorbis to this program, but that's really not a top priority.

The Skype API doesn't provide me a way to access video data, so that cannot be done as of now. Maybe that will be possible in the future, but I'm not totally sure yet if I'd go there anyway. I don't even know if any other Skype recorder (on any platform) can do that, but if it does it's probably doing tricks to get the video. In any case, if someone desperately needs to capture video, you can use 'xvidcap'. Though it might be a pain to mux the video and audio together, especially when you held calls.

SMS? How's that related to audio recording? Can't Skype send SMS all on its own? I don't know Skype essentials.

I'm not surprised at all. afaik MP3 isn't a free format; thats why I suggested OGG. That many people do not know OGG, hardly matters. Your program is a Linux program, any user of it will be able to play OGG, where indeed on a standard ubuntu (and I assume most other distro's) MP3s can not be played back out of the box. Perhaps you could make OGG the standand and MP3 optional if an encoder (lame in your case) is installed.



Its not related of course, except that its one those features sorely missing from the Linux Skype client. The idea here is simply that people are looking for an SMS solution on Skype, so if you have a program (especially one that is easy to install) that does both SMS and call recording, it will gain popularity much faster as it will be on every bodies must have list.

Skype essentials is a solution to send SMSs under Skype for linux:
http://www.kolmann.at/philipp/linux/skysentials/

But its equally hard to install as your program before you packaged it

I'm not well informed about this, but yes, there are open legal/patent issues. But that doesn't matter at all, because free MP3 encoders and decoders exist and MP3 is globally used by everyone as if it would be a free standard. Hardly any end-user ever cares about this.

When not specifically talking about linux, then MP3 is the de facto standard for storing music files, whether it pleases Ubuntu developers or not. And people migrating to linux will want to play their huge MP3 collection. In my opinion, it's a mistake to not support MP3 by default. It's not making linux more attractive. I do like completely free formats, don't get me wrong. I just think it's wrong to ignore the non-free world. I think it's also wrong to think that everything non-free is automatically bad. And no, not all distributions are so picky about this. Mine isn't. And there are by far many more formats and tools beside MP3 where this applies. Linux has always been about choice for me. If I choose to use Opera as browser, then I should be allowed to. But that's only my opinion of course and isn't important here. As I said, Skype Call Recorder will most probably support OGG Vorbis in the future.

It uses liblame, not lame itself, so it's not going to be trivial to make this optional. But I'm not too happy with that idea anyway. As I said, MP3 is known to everyone and can be played everywhere. When you record a Skype call, you won't necessarily play it only on the Ubuntu system you've recorded it on. You might want to put it on your MP3 player, send it to a friend that uses Windows, or (with permission of course) make it publicly available. Converting files between MP3 and OGG is a bad idea, so why not just record them in a way that works for everyone?

With the same argument you could add a music player to your mail program or web design tool to your audio editor. I still think those are completely different tasks and should be handled by different programs. Remember the UNIX philosophy: A tool does only one thing, but does that well. I'm not denying the possibility of Skype Call Recorder to grow more features in other domains, but that's a big change that even involves renaming it. Not planed for soon.

There's the tool to send SMSs. Why you need another one? If installation is the problem, make a request to Ubuntu developers or the developer of this tool to create proper packages.


True. Some of us like precisely that about linux though. But I definitely see the need to make things simple and automatic for the masses.

On this note: You didn't mention whether the .deb package works for you. I'd be glad to get feedback about this.

About the MP3 format, you can have endless discussions about it, but that is not appropriate in this thread. I mostly agree with you btw, but the fact remains that some of the most popular Linux distributions don't play MP3 out of the box, and apparently installing unlicensed MP3 en- or decoders could be illegal in some countries. Since we are not the one making Ubuntu (or Fedora, or Debian, or most distro's I tried that dont play MP3 by default), it makes sense to me to cater for the users, and i would ensure the package installs and works without MP3 encoder, using OGG. Use MP3 if its available Anyway, thats my view on it

Another option would be to include the lame MP3 encoder in your app, if its licence allows redistribution (and I think it does), but then do provide a warning that installing your program might be illegal in some countries.



Heh, point taken. Its just my thinking that both SMS sending and Call recording should have been in Skype for Linux in the first place, so having one program that turns Skype into what it ought to be does make sense to me. The other extreme would be that Skype would consist of 245 programs, one for chat, one for voice, one for SMS, one for video (which used to be seperate as you might remember), etc. That didn't do much good either.



Well, I have all the dependencies installed on my machine now, so that wouldn't be a very good test case. But I'll try with a more fresh/naked Ubuntu install later this week, and let you know.

Alright then, but few people have an out of the box linux. I suspect that 90% of users will have installed MP3 software because they want to use it. Yes, people want non-free stuff: They want youtube (flash is not free software), they want DVDs (ooh, non-free encryption), they want to play AAC files from their iPod, etc. Ubuntu tries to be free of patent issues, which is fine. But users mostly don't care about it, so MP3 isn't much of a problem and my package would install properly for most people. But as you say, this discussion could go on forever, there's not much point here.

OGG Vorbis support will get in eventually. If more people share your opinion, maybe MP3 could be made an optional part, but I'm unsure how to present this though. It could be separated in a base package with OGG/WAV and an add-on package with MP3 support. But having a like 2KB add-on packages seems a bit ridiculous. I could also present two separated version: skype-call-recorder-without-mp3 and skype-call-recorder-with-mp3 that are mutually exclusive. RPM packages also allow subpackages, but I haven't seen support for something like this in DEB files. I'll have to check how Ubuntu/Debian handles this in other situations.

btw, support for FLAC was once on the todo list too, but I decided this is more than pointless. Skype calls aren't of a quality that deserves lossless storage. And if you really want it, or if you really want to use any other format, you can always record to WAV files and convert manually later to whatever you like.

Yes, but that undoes the purpose of having shared libraries, which I think is a good thing. It's also better for security and bugs. If liblame needs to be updated for some reason, Ubuntu's update feature do that and Skype Call Recorder will then also use it.

I strongly agree with this! Unfortunately Skype isn't open source, so I couldn't add built-in support.

Mmh, yes this somewhat makes sense, but it's going to be one huge bloaty program... if someone wants to take that path, why not, but I don't really want that for myself.

You can group them in a sensible way; video and audio belong together, they are both part of the 'call' that is recorded. This allows people to install just what they want, instead of installing one huge complex application when they in fact only want to record one call.

That would be nice, but don't bother too much either. In case it wasn't already obvious, with the binary package you can now uninstall cmake, g++ and the -dev packages, unless of course you plan to continue to compile from source or use the packages in other ways.

I forgot to ask, did desktop integration work for you? You get a menu entry with an icon?

Hello and Thank You for the nice tool.

But on my system after .deb Installation I become a "Service com.Skype.API not found on DBus" message.

Any idea why?

Skysentials work nice...

My Skype version is the latest static...

skype-call-recorder
Initializing application
Got lock on lock file
Loaded 12 preferences from '/home/gregor/.skypecallrecorder.rc'
GUI initialized
Service com.Skype.API not found on DBus

That message means that Skype Call Recorder (SCR) cannot find Skype on DBus (the communication channel between Skype and other programs). Here are the reasons I can think of:

(1) DBus is disabled in Skype, for some reason. Go to the settings under "Public API". Is "DBus" checked at the bottom? I wouldn't know why it would be disabled, but maybe it's fixed when you start Skype with "--enable-dbus".

(2) Maybe Skype is running on the system bus. DBus has a system-wide bus and a session bus for each user. By default Skype uses the session bus and that's where SCR will look for it. Perhaps you are starting Skype with "--use-system-dbus"? In the same settings part, does it say "Bus: [Session]"? (You really shouldn't use the system bus for Skype, unless you have good reasons to.) And if it isn't obvious by now: You need to run SCR as the same user as you run Skype under, so they use the same session bus.

Skysentials might work despite those reasons above, since it uses Skype4Py which might also support X11 as transport and might support the system bus.

If that doesn't show you the problem yet, try installing and starting 'qdbusviewer', which shows you all clients on the system and session bus. The numbers are uninteresting, but Skype should list itself as "com.Skype.API" in the session bus tab. If it doesn't, check the system bus if it's there.

If that all fails or shows nothing suspicious, then I'm puzzled... I hope this helps though. What distribution are you using exactly?

On a different note: Ogg Vorbis support is working now, but I haven't had the time to upload a new package yet. I'm having troubles testing it in Ubuntu running in qemu.

Hi and Thank You, I see the static version of skype doesn't have the DBUS checkbox.
So I think, the static version doesn't support DBUS.

No problem...
After Skype fix a small QT4 problem, I will change back to the normal version.

Add:
A short test with the normal (dynamic) version of skype, no problems anymore.

Very nice !

Ah I see. I've added a note about this on the page.

Version 0.1 is now available for download, as .deb package and as source. Notable changes since 0.0 are support for writing to Ogg Vorbis files and having fixed a file locking issue.

Very nice tool. I've added it to the List of useful tools

I only can say that it's totally awesome. Thank you very much!

@Claudius: Thanks!

@berkus: I'm glad you like it.

A pushed out a new version 0.2.

Upgrading is recommended as version 0.1 and older had a bug that could mess up the settings. After installing it, verify that your settings are still correct. This version will automatically fix some settings if they contain bogus values. Other than that, the changes have been minor and uninteresting.

Thanks to Jan for noticing that bug.

I'd like to start Skype Call recorder on startup, but when I add it to my session, I get this error:

"Skype Call Recorder cannot start, because it requires a system tray. None was detected. (TODO: Make this work even without a system tray.)"

When I try to launch it manually after that, it fails with this error:

"ERROR: cannot get lock on lock file
Other instance is running"

(killing the process obviously cures that).

Given the "TODO" statement, I assume you are already aware of this issue , and I suspect it is just because SCR starts before the gnome tray has loaded, but other apps seem to have no issue with it so I'd like to remind you of this

Also, I have a very minor feature request. Currently we have the choice between stereo and mono mix recordings. I would love to have something inbetween, where the local voice is something like 80% left, 20% right, and the remote voice the opposite. That makes it much more comfortable and natural to listen to than a 100% stereo split.

Thanks ago though for a wonderful little app!

Awesome program, very easy to use.

I just wanted to leave this message because when I first tried to run it on Kubuntu 8.04 it wasn't working. I was able to resolve the issue by installing "dbus-x11".

Hope this helps anyone else that has the same problem.

Since Skype Call Recorder depends on the system tray for any user interaction, it refuses to start if it doesn't detect one. The TODO notice is there to remind me to make it work also for people that do not have a system tray (Gnome and KDE do provide one, but other desktops do not). However I'm unsure how this is best done. As you correctly guessed, in your case SCR has been started before Gnome has loaded the system tray.

I don't use Gnome, so I'm not sure where you put this auto-start stuff. If it's a shell script, you could use something like this instead:

{ sleep 10; skype-call-recorder; } &

This will make it wait 10 seconds and then launching SCR, while still immediately continue executing the script. However, since you're probably not the only one that wants SCR in auto-start, it would make sense if I'd implement another solution. SCR could wait for 10 seconds on its own for example.


Uhm, yes. My bad. SCR is supposed to immediately exit after you click 'OK' on that message, but it doesn't due to a bug.


I agree this could be more pleasant to listen to. The reason why I provide a 100% split is that this is best suited for further editing the recording (like interviews). I'll put it on the TODO list.


You're welcome. And thanks for the feedback.


dbus-x11 is already installed by default on the Ubuntu 8.04 LiveCD and I assume also on a default installation, so maybe this is indeed a dependency I missed and kubuntu doesn't install it by default. However, this package only provides the file /usr/bin/dbus-launch (and documentation), and SCR doesn't use that at all, so I wonder why it is necessary. Possibly SCR uses it indirectly via libdbus to launch DBus when it's not running yet, but then it should be a dependency of that package. In what way did it fail? Error message? (I will try with a Kubuntu live CD.)

I've been testing the issue ArcaneBane reported with the Kubuntu Live CD 8.04.1 and indeed, dbus-x11 is required in order for SCR (and probably Skype itself) to be able to fire up DBus when it's not already running. I still wonder why this isn't an indirect dependency. Will be fixed in the next version.

FYI, I pushed out version 0.4, which should address all of the issues and wishes that P4man and ArcaneBane mentioned. Available at the usual place: http://atdot.ch/scr/

If there's any remaining problem, please let me know. (Since I'm not on this forum every day, you'll get my attention faster if you use the contact form on my site or email me.)

When I try compiling the code I get the following error:


while configuring went fine


Any ideas what exactly is deprecated and how to fix this?
Thanks.

There was an issue with libvorbis version 1.2.0 and earlier, which I fixed, but then it turned out the fix itself was completely broken, which causes the problem that you see. The website has an updated source tarball that corrects this, in case you didn't see it already.

Version 0.5 is to be out soon, fixing some more issues.

Oooh this little app just keeps on getting better. Everything I asked for got into it lol, the debian package, OGG support, now even the stereo mix slider. I love it

But I can think of more requests though I frequently run 2 instances of Skype (with different login). SCR seems to detect only the first Skype instance, and if I quit that, it won't see the second one still active (and therefore, won't record until I restart it). Im not sure if this is possible with the Skype API, but it would be wonderful if SCR were aware of multiple running instances and record from all of them.

@ jlh,

Got the new code, compiled smoothly. Doesn't run.
Tried running from menu, form console, from gdb... all fail.

Here's what gdb says:
----------------------
Initializing application
Got lock on lock file
Can't open '/home/eugeniu/.skypecallrecorder.rc' for loading preferences
Loading 18 built-in default preference(s)
(no debugging symbols found)
...
(no debugging symbols found)
GUI initialized

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 0x7faf58fcd780 (LWP 22277)]
0x00007faf569666f9 in QString::fromLocal8Bit () from /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4
---------------------------

If it's of any importance, this is all on amd64.

If it helps you, I could compile with debugging symbols on.

SCR communicates with Skype over D-Bus. Skype will publish itself on D-Bus under the name "com.Skype.API" so that SCR can find it. But only one program can hold any given name at a time, so the second instance won't succeed in getting that name, and it won't retry when the first instance goes away. This is why SCR doesn't detect the second instance. And that's beside the fact that SCR will refuse to start up twice (when it's not buggy like in version 0.4 at least ).

I run more than one instance of Skype too, sometimes, but I always run them as separate users. Since all this happens on the session D-Bus (which is per-user), it won't be a problem in that situation. (But I experience Skype's audio capture to be problematic when there's more than one instance.)


You bet this is of importance! I have no amd64 machine myself, so support for this has been slow. But very recently someone was able to give me a stack backtrace from gdb and I could identify the problem. (You get the backtrace when you type 'bt' at the gdb prompt, that's always a valuable information when reporting segfaults.)

A new version is to be out very soon hopefully, but it might take a day or two. I created a public git repository today, so you can fetch the latest version that has this problem (and other bugs) fixed. I'll put instructions on the website soon, but in a nutshell, here's what you do:

1. Make sure 'git' is installed (on Ubuntu, the package is called 'git-core')
2. Go where you want the source to be and run this: git clone git://repo.or.cz/skype-call-recorder.git
3. You now have a new directory "skype-call-recorder", proceed to compile as usual

@ jlh

Thanks a lot! It works perfectly now. I just recorder a call.

Thanks so much for a 64 bit build! I tested it with the Skype test service and it worked flawlessly!

Thanks again!

A feature suggestion:
Strip the non-numeric characters from the folder names in which the calls are stored.
For example, if I copy/paste a number from the web, it often has "(" and ")" in it. Skype works fine and makes the call, but SCR saves the audio in a folder that has the parenthesis in the name. This can be confusing if next time I just use the bare number as things get saves somewhere else.