Treo Call, Sound & Memo Recordings with CallRec
For as long as I can remember a number of Treonauts have been looking for an application to easily record their conversations and I have finally come across one that works extremely well.
CallRec ($19.99) is a small and extremely easy to use application which will record any sound (not only a telephone conversation) coming in or out of your Treo at the simple push of the Side Button.
CallRec will be ready to use immediately after installation and no additional settings whatsoever are required. The software automatically sets the Side Button as the recording trigger and once pressed the normal blinking green light under the antenna will turn to blinking orange to indicate that CallRec is in operation.
CallRec operates in the background without the need to manually launch the application and all recordings are conveniently saved to your SD Card in WMA format (about 4MB per minute). You can listen to your recordings by pressing the View button within CallRec (above left) which opens a pop-up with Play/Pause/Stop and Volume buttons but annoyingly no Forward/Backward button even though one can do this using the slider.
The initial name for a recording is the Date/Time stamp but each file can be manually renamed. I personally wish that the listing of recordings would also display the length and allow for sorting but this is currently unavailable. Also, CallRec will not record via a Bluetooth headset but it does however work extremely well with a wired headset such as my Seidio 2in1 Retractable.
The only small bug that I’ve found relates to the operation of the Side Button. CallRec is triggered with a single press of the Side Button but if you inadvertently press + hold it then CallRec will create a new media file for every second that you keep it pressed. Additionally, my normal press + hold Side Button function which normally launches Pocket Tunes has been disabled by CallRec. I hope that a future update will address these issues.
Overall, I found CallRec to be an excellent and incredibly quick and simple program to record my conversations, voicemail messages or even a short memo while on the go. If Palm were to consider including a recording application in our future Treo I would definitely start looking here even though CallRec could benefit from a few minor enhancements and additional functionality.
Treonauts keep a record of everything… 
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Comments
I've tried this app and in theory it is very useful. But in practice I can't use it. I use the side button to start Pocket Tunes but this application takes over the side button and there is no way to configure it to use another button or to use a double-press so that the single long press could still be used to launch Pocket Tunes (or another application). I use Pocket Tunes much more frequently than record a voice call.
Also I found the sound quality to be quite low and it was skipping.
Finally my Treo came to a crawl during recording.
I also hope the next version will address these problems, but for now definately not worth $20 bucks.
If I record a conversation, is it possible to replay that soundbyte over the phone, to someone on the other side?
It does record through my Sony-Ericsson HBH-662.
But I cannot play the recorded clip via the bluetooth headset. That's a little bit inconvenient.
Why the glowing review? It looks like a pretty junky piece of software. Not only does it hijack the sidebutton, it will only record to the Wav format. Better hope you have a huge SD with lots of free space since that works out to about 5MB for every minute. Also, other users have reported that it's easy to accidentally start it due to it being tied to the side button.
Why do so many review sites serve as essentially apologists for crappy software developers? How hard would it have been to include a mp3 encoder, or give the user the option of how to start it?
I purposely do not clutter my Treo 650 because stability is a priority for me. I have a different calculator and a couple applications on the SD card and that's it. I bought this, entered the registration key, and watched it crash/reset my phone each time I started it during a call. I emailed them for a solution, however at this point I just want my money back. - George
"Also I found the sound quality to be quite low and it was skipping.
Finally my Treo came to a crawl during recording."
I echo this assessment. Also, I don't understand the glowing review either. I found this app to be one of the five worst apps I ever tried on my Treo. Maybe the next iteration will be better.
Evidently not everyone has been happy with this application and I need to clarify a few things...
I don't think that I have given CallRec a 'glowing' review and although I have personally not had any reset problems and the program has worked well I am nonetheless fully aware of its current limitations, bugs and annoyances.
Having said this, CallRec is the _only_ application that can record your conversations and this is why I found it worthy to mention.
There is no doubt that CallRec is far from perfect and that it requires further updates but overall I found it to deliver well on the conversation recording front.
Cheers, A.
CallRec isn't the only application that can record your Treo Voice conversations. I know of a few. While I haven't had a chance yet to play with all of these myself, I've heard very good things about mVoice v4.0:
http://www.motionapps.com/products.jsp?mvoice
There is also Personal Audio Recorder (PAR):
http://www.toysoft.ca/par.html
And lastly, if you want to break away from the $20-30 bracket and bust out the big guns, there is Audacity Professional which looks very full featured for $100.00:
http://www.audiost.com/advrpro.htm
(They also have a more stripped down personal version for $30.00)
Don't let CallRec control your life. :)
Oh, and I believe that all of these applicaitons work best with a combo headset like the Seidio. They will also work using the phone's speakerphone, to varying results based on background noise. They will not work using Bluetooth as the Treo 650 does not support the latest stack. And they will not work with the phone to your ear as many aspects of the PDA / radio components were kept separate by Palm and the carriers for reasons of control.
-Jay
Jay - thank you very for your comment.
I had just seen earlier today that mVoice has been updated to include call recording functionality.
mVoice was by far my favourite recording application before and I will take a close look at their new improvements.
Cheers, A.
Have heard of sound quality problems with CallRec, but haven't tried it myself yet.
Did try mvoice thought:
Pros:
v4.2 is much better than earlier. More options
Cons:
though it claims to have a phonecall recording feature -- it's still seems to record from speaker. The quality of voice recording, even on the highest setting, is very gabled and the program seems to be having problems with high/low tones
recoding on SD card is choppy -- skips words.
When I got the callrec 3.0 it did not work for me. Then I was wondering if I just paid for a bum software. E-Mailed support and what do you know they did care!!! Told them my problem, what phone I had and what service and was sent a 3.01 beta to see if it would work with all the extra junk I have on my phone and guess what, It works!!!!!!!! So I am a happy customer yes indeed.
At first I was impressed. This dog partially hunts, but be warned it is selective. On my Treo the record in-coming calls only will not work on its own and their tech people wanted me to sort the problem out!
This is nice, but has anyone created a software that will record streaming audio through the Treo, like TotalRecorder does for PCs? That's what I'm really looking for.
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