If all application would use sound-systems like Arts things could be so much easier. But since some tools insist on going directly to Alsa or OSS there is a problem when you want to record what you’re playing. Especially when it’s two-way-communication as it is with Ekiga.
After trying to record a conversation with Audacity and KRecord, which failed, I had a look at a tool that’s not exactly made for that purpose, Wireshark.
Wireshark has a lot of useful functions, including a decoder for SIP-communcation.
I fired up Wireshark, started capturing and made the call. After hanging up I stopped capturing and went to Statistics -> VoIP-calls. It clearly shows me my call, but doesn’t let me do much with it. The magic begins when I click Statistics -> RTP -> Show All Streams.
Here I could see four streams. Two H261-streams, which are for video, and two G711 PCMU-streams, which are the audio-part. I click on the first audio-stream and then click “Find Reverse” to get both directions of the communcation. A click on “Analyze” brings up another window with the stream, where I can also find the button “Save Payload”, which will export the conversation.
I suggest using “.au” here, the raw stream didn’t work very well for me.
The resulting file already is usable, but I found it not to be very load. But that’s something that can easily be fixed with a little amplification through Audacity or another tool like it.