2009 December | Evoca
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Create and Share Digital Voice Recordings
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Monthly Archives: December 2009

Evoca makes recording conference calls easy

December 28, 2009 in General Announcements by admin  |  No Comments

Evoca makes it easy to record conference calls using any phone and your favorite conference call service.

Whether you use FreeConferenceCall.com, Calliflower.com,  GoToMeeting, or any of the other free or paid services, Evoca enables you to record conference calls using any of them.  These services provide some level of  call recording, but none of them have the robust recording management, voice-to-online posting, and sharing features that Evoca offers. If you decide to change your conference call service, all of your recordings are in one place — your Evoca account.

How to record a conference call using Evoca with your favorite conference call service:

  • Call the conference call number and enter your host or participant code to join the conference call
    • “Hi everyone, this is Jamie. As planned, we’re going record today’s conference call. I’m going to bring in the recording services shortly.   Stay on the call.”
    • Or you may not want to announce you are recording the conference call if your state/country notification laws do not require it.
  • Dial your favorite worldwide Evoca phone number
    • You will hear the standard Evoca welcome greeting.
  • Rejoin the conference call to record your interview
    • This phone feature is known as three-way dialing on your Blackberry, iPhone, and most mobile phones and landlines.
  • End the conference call.  Evoca instantly saves the conference call as an MP3 recording in your Evoca account or — just hang up the Evoca phone number (we save the recording instantly) and continue talking.
  • From you Evoca account you can

    • Email the recording to your colleagues, students, supporters, or customers so they can listen and download it as needed
    • Keep the recording private for internal use
    • Post it online to websites, blogs, and social media sites with the Flash player widget that Evoca provides. For your online visitors, real voice recordings bring text and images to life.
    • Get it transcribed or do it yourself

To get some experience with recording your conference calls, you can sign up for an Evoca Express free trial subscription.  No credit card is required.  During your 30-day trial period you get 15 minutes of recording storage time.

If you need to start recording an important longer (than 15 minutes) conference call now, sign-up for your Evoca Express Pro subscription to conduct an interview of any length. You get 10 hours of recording storage time and can  add “buckets” of 10 hours any time for $2.00/month.  You can also simply click to order a transcription online from right inside your Evoca Express account.

Hint #1:  To make it really easy to use the recording or find it later on, create Albums named for your department, team, or class. You can easily add each new conference call recording to the appropriate album.

Hint #2: Practice a conference call recording before you record your first “real” call.  Once you’ve recorded your first conference call using Evoca;  it’s like riding a bike, you’ll be able to do it again and again.

Be sure to bookmark or print this blog article to have the instructions handy!

Evoca launches global phone recording service to capture family stories during the holidays and year-round

December 18, 2009 in "How-To" posts, Blog, General Announcements, International, Interviews, Media, Releases, Social Networking, the Best Of Evoca..., Twitter by admin  |  No Comments

Inspired by the annual “National Day of Listening” sponsored by StoryCorps and National Public Radio, Evoca makes family storytelling and recording a daily event during the holidays and year-round.

Using 21st century Internet and phone technologies Evoca launched “Every Day of Listening” to enable family members who are getting together at Grandma’s house or even across the ocean from each other to record using any phone, Skype, and a computer mic. With a shared Evoca account, creating a family audio memory album is possible whether family members can get together in person or not.

Getting underway is easy. The family “organizer” signs up online for an Evoca Express Pro subscription and registers up to 30 phone numbers of the family members who can call to record stories, memories, and humor. For family members located in different countries or any Skype users, 30 Skype accounts can also be registered. The organizer can sign up for a free trial subscription to practice. Then any family member with a registered phone number or Skype account simply dials any Evoca public phone number, hears the cheerful Evoca greeting: “Welcome to Evoca. Record after the beep and hang up when you’re done”, talks, and hangs up. The recording is instantly stored in the family account as an MP3 recording. Recording a Skype call starts by clicking on the Evoca Skype Call Recorder contact in your Skype account. Since Evoca is a web service, no software downloads or updates are required.

J’miah Nabawi, national award-winning storyteller, teaching and performing artist, and Evoca’s Artist-in-Residence offered, “Everyone has a story to tell. With Evoca, precious stories of family members, especially our elders, can be captured, shared, and saved for future generations.” He added, “We applaud StoryCorps and National Public Radio for encouraging the telling and sharing of family members’ stories. We are thrilled that Evoca makes it possible for anyone, anywhere to share their stories, short or long, simply by picking up their phone. They also can include singing, music, and laughter for their loved ones to hear.”

Two family members can easily record together with one of them asking questions and the other giving the answers. StoryCorps calls them “interview partners” and offers a terrific “Great Questions” guide. Evoca provides step by step instructions about how to record an interview by phone or Skype. The family can even record a group of people in “conference call” style using Evoca’s phone or Skype features. Evoca also provides its subscribers with a Browser Mic, an in-browser Flash recorder, which can also be embedded in a family genealogy website or blog to collect voice recordings using any computer mic.

The recordings can be kept private, emailed to family members, downloaded to a CD to mail to Grandma, or posted to family and genealogy websites, blogs, and social networking profiles such as Facebook. RSS feeds can alert family members to new recordings that they can add to their  Tunes, iPhones and iPods. Transcriptions are available through Evoca’s online transcription service.

About Evoca

Evoca is a leading global Voice-to-Web services provider, enabling businesses, organizations and individuals to easily create, post, and share fresh, engaging voice recordings using any phone, Skype™, and its browser microphone. Evoca Express (www.evoca.com) is available as a Free 30-day trial, Pro, Local, and Toll-free subscription. It provides voice recording and online digital content distribution services through its highly scalable “Software-as-a-Service” media platform, providing worldwide public phone numbers, as well as dedicated telephone numbers available in over 45 countries and more than 5,000 cities around the globe.

Organizations of any size can easily integrate and customize Evoca features into their online properties, marketing programs, education and language training courses, and customer-facing operations. Evoca launched its Twitter audio update application, TweeVoca to enable posting of audio recordings to this popular micro-blogging site. Evoca subscribers can also “share” recordings on Facebook, MySpace, websites, and blogs by posting digital media players streamed by Evoca. Large organizations and partners can also benefit from Evoca Enterprise, its multi-media platform delivered through a flexible interface (RESTful HTTP API – applications programming interface).

For more information, visit www.evoca.com or contact Evoca at +1.212.372.7670, toll-free U.S./Canada +1-866-940-9988, businessdevelopment@evoca.com, use our online contact form http://www.evoca.com/contact.php, or record your message using our Skype call recorder contact: evoca-bizdev-call-recorder. Any Evoca Express subscriber can receive the Evoca Express training schedule by emailing: customerservice@evoca.com.

©2009 Evoca LLC. All rights reserved.  All copyrights and trademarks mentioned herein are property of their respective owners.

Posting and sharing iPhone 3G Voice Memos and iTunes recordings made easy by Evoca

December 4, 2009 in General Announcements, Media, Social Networking, the Best Of Evoca..., Twitter by admin  |  No Comments

Evoca (www.evoca.com) has expanded its voice recording services to instantly convert Apple-supported AAC, MP4, and AIFF audio file formats to MP3 recordings for easy posting online, sharing with customers, audiences, and supporters, and emailing to professional and personal contacts. This increase in services directly benefits users of Apple products and services.

For example, Evoca Express subscribers with an iPhone 3G can create a voice recording, known as a Voice Memo, let it auto-synch to iTunes™, and then upload the Voice Memo from iTunes to their Evoca Express account. Evoca already supports MP3 file upload and WAV upload conversion to MP3 files.

Apple suggests ”Capture a thought, a memo, a meeting, or any audio recording with Voice Memos”. The Evoca team adds: “Then share your Voice Memo online with your customers, audiences, or supporters using Evoca’s Flash player widgets, email, or bookmarking.”

Users of Apple products and services who also subscribe to Evoca Express have many choices for posting and sharing recordings from their Evoca Express account: post online in an audio player widget provided by Evoca; share the widget with their website visitors to post in their own social profiles, blogs, or websites; email recordings to colleagues, followers, students, and friends; download recordings to their computer, burn a CD, or archive it online. Recordings stored on an iPod™ can also be auto-synched to iTunes and instantly converted by Evoca to MP3 recordings upon upload to their Evoca account. In compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), protected WMA files in iTunes cannot be converted.

To experience the benefits first-hand, iPhone, iPod, and iTunes users can sign up for a Free 30-day trial or an Evoca Express Pro, Local, or Toll-free subscription starting at $4.95 per month. As a web service, no software downloads are required. Subscribers can also create voice recordings using any phone, Skype™, and browser mic. Current Evoca Express subscribers get this service expansion at no additional cost.

An audio file format is a file format for storing audio data on a computer system or other digital devices such as smart phones, iPods, and MP3 players. The file formats mentioned above are summarized as follows:

  • MP3: The file format extension is .mp3. Evoca converts WAV files and Apple-supported formats AAC, M4A, and AIFF to MP3 format and then stores and streams these MP3 files per the subscriber’s decision to share a recording or keep it for private use. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players. A 32 bit 44,100 Hz MP3 recording is stored at 32 bit 44,100 Hz. When Evoca detects a new file’s existing sample rate, the audio gets up-sampled to the next 11,025 Hz if it is not already an interval of 11,025 Hz.
  • WAV: Windows Audio Format. File format extension is .wav. Short for Waveform, it is a format used on Windows systems for raw and typically uncompressed audio. Since uncompressed WAV files are quite large in size, as file sharing over the Internet has become popular, the WAV format has declined in popularity. It was developed jointly by Microsoft™ and IBM™. Evoca converts WAV to MP3 files upon upload and also in its Phone-to-Web voice recording process.
  • AAC: Advanced Audio Coding. File format extension is .aac. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC is best known for being the default audio format for Apple’s iPhone, iPod and iTunes, and is also the standard iTunes Store audio format.
  • M4A: File format extension is .m4a.  M4A stands for MPEG 4 Audio. An M4A file always contains only MPEG 4 Audio. Apple Computer started using and popularizing the M4A file extension to denote the file was an unprotected (non digital rights management) MPEG 4 Audio file.
  • AIFF: Audio Interchange File Format. File format extension is .aiff or .aif. Created by Apple, it is used for audio and video applications. Like any non-compressed format, it uses much more disk space than MP3.

About Evoca

Evoca is a leading global Voice-to-Web services provider, enabling businesses, organizations and individuals to easily create, post, and share fresh, engaging voice recordings using any phone, Skype™, and its browser microphone. Evoca Express (www.evoca.com) is available as a Free 30-day trial, Pro, Local, and Toll-free subscription. It provides voice recording and online digital content distribution services through its highly scalable “Software-as-a-Service” media platform, providing worldwide public phone numbers, as well as dedicated telephone numbers available in over 45 countries and more than 5,000 cities around the globe.

Organizations of any size can easily integrate and customize Evoca features into their online properties, marketing programs, education and language training courses, and customer-facing operations. Evoca launched its Twitter audio update application, TweeVoca to enable posting of audio recordings to this popular micro-blogging site. Evoca subscribers can also “share” recordings on Facebook, MySpace, websites, and blogs by posting digital media players streamed by Evoca. Large organizations and partners can also benefit from Evoca Enterprise, its multi-media platform delivered through a flexible interface (RESTful HTTP API – applications programming interface).

For more information, visit www.evoca.com or contact Evoca at +1.212.372.7670, toll-free U.S./Canada +1-866-940-9988, businessdevelopment@evoca.com, use our online contact form http://www.evoca.com/contact.php, or record your message using our Skype call recorder contact: evoca-bizdev-call-recorder.