PowerGramo - On My Evaluation List

I've become an avid Skype user, to the point that I use it several times a day to keep in touch with business contacts, friends, and relatives around the globe. So, when I read that Steve Gillmor just revamped his podcasting setup to use Skype with PowerGramo, it instantly caught my attention.

Back in the early 1970's my grandfather and I recorded a lot of phone conversations. He lived in Florida, while I lived in California, and since he was getting on in years we both wanted to preserve our chats - however banal they might have been - to review later and pass on to future generations. Our approach was pretty simple. We both had cheap tape recorders, so we went out and bought a little induction coil device from our local Radio Shack stores that used a suction cup to attach to our phones. Simple, straight forward, and worked extremely well.

Now, roughly 30 years later, I'm using Skype to communicate across time zones and the world. But, at least so far, I have yet to find a call recording solution that comes close to working as well as our old Radio Shack pickups. At first I tried Hot Recorder, but ran into a lot of frustrating problems.

Hot Recorder wasn't integrated into Skype, so I always had to deal with another window popping up on my computer screen. The "free", ad-based Hot Recorder application had flashing ads that were very distracting, and it always popped up when I least expected it. After a few days of getting frustrated by it, I gave in and bought the paid version - thinking I would see some significant improvement.

Unfortunately things didn't get any better. The obnoxious flashing ads were gone, but the application would still pop up at odd moments, and sometimes covered my entire screen. While I was successful in getting it to record Skype calls, the resulting audio frequently had time lags or echos. I had pretty much resigned myself to not being able to record Skype calls.

Then Steve Gillmor, the host of a couple of my favorite podcasts, mentioned that he's using PowerGramo. A quick read through the PowerGramo website convinced me that it's at least worth a try. Like Hot Recorder, there's a free PowerGramo version and a paid version. I'm not going to go into a detail comparison yet - that will come later after I have a chance to put it through its paces. But from the website, faq, and other material, it looks like it will do everything I have been looking for.

Related links:

PowerGramo website

Gillmor Daily Podshow

Comments

[Victoria Renber]

Gee! I really beg to differ with LEM. I've been using the paid version of HotRecorder for more than 3 months now, and it works like a charm! 100 % reliability, outstanding recording output + it comes with these funny emotisounds that can be added to the conversation. HotRecorder has a cool indexing feature which enables you to retrieve audio files based on the keywords you've chosen. With the paid version I never experienced any popping-up windows at all. Even with the free (ads supported) version, there are no popups. The ads are circumbscribed to a pre-defined sector of the application. I'm wondering whether LEM has really tried HotRecorder! Regarding PowerGramo, I've heard is completely unreliable, but this is only hearsay. I didn't try it by myself.

[Lem]

Victoria,
Obviously your experience has been different than mine. Just to set the record straight I have tried to use HotRecorder for months, and all of my comments come from first hand experience. Even the HotRecorder documentation talks about the syncronization problems that I ran into. As for PowerGramo, I'm not trying to promote it either. I only mentioned that it is on my evaluation list because I've found HotRecorder to be unusable.

[jirong zhou]

hi Lem,

This is Jirong from Monsters Team. PowerGramo is one of our job. I am interested to provide you a Pro license for the Evaluation. Simple drop me an email or call me in Skype:jirongzhou

Best
J