I wanted to record calls on my Android phone (Nexus one). The easy way would have been to download an app but I like tinkering. And given that I recently bought Tasker, android’s very own swiss knife, I thought I should give it a run. After just an hour I was able to create my very own call recorder (some time went into trial and error with things as this was my first major task with tasker and also some things didn’t work with nexus one, which I will note below). I’ll outline the process to set it up here in as much detail as possible and will also provide the profiles. Please note that I made this setup for nexus one but it should work on pretty much any android phone and, in fact, it might work even better on your phone by making a few tweaks that I will outline as Nexus one doesn’t allow jacking into the call streams directly but your phone might.

So, let’s begin. My visioned scenario is like this:

  1. When you start a call (incoming or outgoing), i.e., when both the parties have picked up the phone, a notification should appear in the status bar.

  2. Clicking on this notification should start recording the call. It should also give way to another notification now.

  3. This new notification should stop the call recording when clicked.

  4. If you don’t stop the call recording, the recording should automatically stop when the call ends.

To achieve the steps mentioned above, you will have to create “4” profiles in tasker. The xml files for these profiles are provided in a zip at the end of this article that you can download and import into tasker directly. If you want to understand more about whats going on, here are the details of each profile so that you can understand and modify them according to your needs. These profiles are:

Profile 1. Call Started

Tasker description:

Profile: Call started Event: Phone Offhook Enter: 11 Execute, Abort New Task A0: Variable Clear [ Name:%RECORDING ] A1: Notify [ Title:Record Call Text: Icon: Number: Permanent: ]

Notes:

None

Profile 2. Record Call

Tasker description:

Profile: Record call Event: Notification Click Enter: Record Call Execute, Abort New Task A0: Notify Cancel [ Title:Record Call Warn Not Exist: ] A1: Variable Set [ Name:%RECORDING To:1 Do Maths: Append: ] A2: In-Call Volume [ Level:5 Display: Sound: ] A3: Speakerphone [ Set:On ] A4: Flash [ Text:Started Recording Long: ] A5: Notify [ Title:Stop Record Call Text: Icon: Number: Permanent: ] A6: Record Audio [ File:shantz/call-%CNUM-%CDATE-%CTIME Source:Microphone MaxSize: ]

**Notes: **

Note the steps A2, A3 and A6. Basically Nexus one has a limitation that you cannot record directly from the call streams. So, I’m doing the recording from the microphone and this works best if the phone is in speakerphone mode. So, I’m turning up the call volume and setting speakerphone mode in A2 and A3 respectively. You can try tweaking these 2 steps (having different call volumes and not engaging speakerphone mode and you might have passable results without doing these as well). Also, try using “Call”, “Incoming Call”, “Outgoing Call” etc as sources in step A6 instead of microphone to check if your phone supports direct call stream recording. If it does, then you will have excellent recording quality and you can also remove steps A2 and A3.

Profile 3. Stop Record Call

Tasker description:

Profile: Stop record call Event: Notification Click Enter: Stop Record Call Execute, Abort New Task A0: Record Audio Stop [ ] A1: Notify Cancel [ Title:Record Call Warn Not Exist: ] A2: Notify Cancel [ Title:Stop Record Call Warn Not Exist: ] A3: Flash [ Text:Stopped Recording Long: ] A4: Variable Clear [ Name:%RECORDING ] A5: Speakerphone [ Set:Off ]

**Notes: **

None

Profile 4. Call Complete

Tasker description:

Profile: Call complete Event: Phone Idle Enter: Stop Record Call Execute, Abort New Task A0: Record Audio Stop [ ] A1: Notify Cancel [ Title:Record Call Warn Not Exist: ] A2: Notify Cancel [ Title:Stop Record Call Warn Not Exist: ] A3: Flash [ Text:Stopped Recording Long: ] A4: Variable Clear [ Name:%RECORDING ] A5: Speakerphone [ Set:Off ]

**Notes: **

None

Download: Android Tasker Call Record Profiles

And we are done, you can download the profile xml files in the zip file linked here.

Let me know if you need any clarifications on the above steps. I would also love to get your suggestions to make this better or if you have any of your own tasker tips and tricks. I’ll be posting more of my tasker adventures soon :)