I haven't recorded audio for my remote/phonecall Indian Electronica interviews in a long time - back in the days of landlines my preferred method involved plugging a phone's receiver through a $20 Radioshack wire-tap and the tap into the phone's base; simple and clean.

Since I did away with a landline years ago I suppose I just hadn't spent the time to figure out a more modern approach involving software, until today!  The new approach involves routing a Skype call's input and output to ableton live.  You see, by default Skype will send sound devices just 1 output channel with the voice of whomever is on the receiving end of the call so you have to grab another input from your skype-mic to combine with that output to then route into Ableton.

After reading mention of this on CDM, I jumped into making this work today and am bloody stoked with the results! Ultimately, the learning curve resulted from not knowing what I needed as in-between infrastructure; to utimately combine the IOs... But when you have it all in place the whole setup is pretty simple.

Software needed:

• Skype (to make phone-calls)
• Soundflower (to take Skype's output and connect it to Ableton)
• LineIn (to grab its own copy of the mic used with Skype to output to Soundflower- make sure to click the 'Pass thru' button)
• Ableton Live (to receive a live audio feed from the virtual Soundflower device and record it in real time).