Recording SIP conversations

My chief prefers to use SIP (voice conversations) instead of Jabber (text messaging). The problem is that he sometimes overloads me with a lot of information, and later I forget 90%. This is not a problem with Jabber, as there are logs. However, I don't know any SIP client that supports recording of conversations out of the box.

Here is my solution. You need alsa-lib 1.0.17 or later (i.e., if you are using Debian Lenny, due to the freeze, you'll have to fetch libasound2 and libasound2-dev from experimental). Create the subdirectory named "voice" in your home directory. Add these lines to $HOME/.asoundrc:

pcm.voice {
        type asym
        playback.pcm {
                type file
                file "/home/user/voice/p"
                slave.pcm "default"
                format "wav"
                truncate 0
        }
        capture.pcm {
                type file
                file "/home/user/voice/c"
                slave.pcm "default"
                format "wav"
                truncate 0
        }
}

Then, configure your SIP client (I use twinkle) as follows. ALSA device for rings: "default", ALSA speaker: "voice", ALSA microphone: "voice", Play back ring tone when the network doesn't: disable. As the result, ALSA library will write the following files into the voice directory: p, c, p.0001, c.0001, p.0002, c.0002, and so on (the number is incremented for each new call). All these files are in wav format, "p" files correspond to the remote side, and "c" files contain what you spoke into the microphone. It appears that it is impossible to record both parties of the conversation into one file using only built-in features that come with ALSA.

To play back the conversation, do:

aplay p.0002 & aplay c.0002

This will cause two aplay processes to be started in parallel, with their outputs mixed. Or, you can make one mixed wav file with sox:

sox -m c.0002 p.0002 -f wav talk0002.wav