Gizmo Project Rocks

I've had the pleasure in the last couple of weeks to talk to a number of fun, interesting, and knowledgeable people as I prepare the podcast to end all podcasts—the back-to-school podcast for Blawg Review #22, which will be hosted by Blawg Wisdom on September 5. As you may recall, I've been trying to figure out a good way to record phone interviews for podcasting purposes. I started with Slapcast, which allows you to record 5-minute bits of conversation with someone just by creating a 3-way call. Simple, easy, cool, except that 5 minutes is kind off limiting. It's a pain to get into a conversation and then be cut off at the 5 minute mark, redial, get back into it, get cut off, etc. Plus, it means lots of editing to put the bits together later. Then I Iooked into using Skype to record calls, but the only way I found to do that seemed incredibly complicated (and a bit costly in terms of software required). Then the good folks at Slapcast invited me to try a Skype recording beta that allows you to make a 3-way conference call in Skype to record your call—way cool! It's pretty darned close to one-click call-recording. The only real drawback is that Slapcast costs $5 month.

Enter GizmoProject. It's free, it allows you to call any phone in the world (or any other Gizmo user, obviously), and it has true one-click recording that works, well, pretty great. It seems to add a bit of a break to your recording every few minutes—I think it has to do w/disk speed and saving the file as you talk or something. But still, the quality is better than most recorded phone calls, you can talk as long as you want, and, like I said, one click and you're recording. And did I mention it's free? Ok, it's not totally free. The ability to call actual phone numbers requires you to buy call-out credit which is about 1.8 cents/minute. That's not much, and Skype has the same requirement, so on balance Gizmo definitely wins b/c of its ease of recording.

So if I could channel Strongbad : Everybody to the Gizmo! (Go here and download the song “Everybody to the Limit” if you don't know what I'm talking about. You'll be glad you did.)

Posted August 27, 2005 10:49 AM | voices