I'm looking to record audio of my sessions to kind of chronicle the game.

Does anyone know of a good, free, program to do that with, that also doesn't create massive files?

18 minutes ago, OddballE8 said:

I'm looking to record audio of my sessions to kind of chronicle the game.

Does anyone know of a good, free, program to do that with, that also doesn't create massive files?

I use my IPhone, but it’s not by any means a good program nor is it easy to review and/or transcribe. In a pinch it works though.

I would also be interested in a better solution though.

Yeah, I already have my Laptop at the table to play music and look at rules or maps (got most of the books scanned and adventures too... saves a lot of travel weight), so I would like something to use on that laptop.

Audacity is a pretty decent freeware audio recorder. Also comes with powerful editing tools. It can get pretty slow if you have recordings on multiple tracks, but for your purpose you'd probably only use one track.

I use it for various projects sometimes, but only for few minute clips. If you render it as mp3 it roughly results in a little less than 1mb per minute of audio. The size of the project files is neglectable.

Downside is you'd need a pretty decent omnidirectional microphone to record a whole table and have everyone intelligible.

Well, I was gonna record sessions that last several hours.

1 hour ago, OddballE8 said:

Well, I was gonna record sessions that last several hours.

Audacity works fine for longer projects.

Another vote for Audacity - it can easily do what you require. However, depending on your setup you might not be able to play music while recording. It's not impossible, but special hardware might be required.

You might also consider that without an investment in microphones, it's going to sound pretty weak.

There's no getting around massive files, though. You can record mono with a really low bitrate and you might find a sweet spot where the sample rate and the cheap mic work well enough, but it will take some experimentation. As a general rule, the larger the file, the better the quality.

Check with @GM Hooly as he has a nice set up for The Dice Pool Genesys podcast. Although it will only be as good as the room and mike set up.

Good mics and good equipment are key. I have the full Adobe Suite so it makes it easy to edit. We use Sonus and a potent PC to record though.