How to Record an Audio Chat With iChat

Audio chat is becoming a popular way to keep in touch with friends and for collaborating on work or other projects while teleworking or freelancing. There may be a time when you want to refer back to a particular conversation for work, keep a record of your conversations or just listen back to a friendly voice. Apple's iChat application has a built-in feature that allows you to record your audio chats with only a few clicks and saves it as an .m4a file that you can play with iTunes and put on your iPod or iPhone to listen on the go. Here is how.

Things You'll Need

• Apple computer running Mac OS 10.5 Leopard
• iChat
• AIM, Jabber, MobileMe, or GoogleTalk account (free)

Instructions

1. Sign up for an instant messenger account with AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, or sign up for a MobileMe account if you don't have one.

2. 

   Launch iChat.

3. 

   Set your status to "Available" if you haven't already.

4. 

   Open up your Buddy List. Go to the top menu, select "Window" and click on the name of the Buddy List you want to open. For example, if you're using AIM, click on "AIM Buddy List" to open up that account's Buddy List.

5. Find a friend you want to chat with and click on her or his name. Make sure that friend has an audio or video icon next to their name in the iChat Buddy List.

6. 

   At the bottom of the Buddy List window, click the Audio Chat button (the one that looks like a telephone). The chat will begin when your friend accepts your Audio Chat request.

7. 

   Select "Record Chat" from the "Video" menu at the top of the screen. Recording will begin when your friend has given permission to record the audio chat. You'll see a red light next to the mute button (a microphone with a slash through it) while the conversation is being recorded.

8. 

   Select "Stop Recording" from the "Video" menu at the top to stop the recording.

9. Navigate to Documents/iChat/iChats to find the audio chat file that was saved for you. Double-click it to add this iChat conversation to your iTunes Library. You can then sync it to your iPod or iPhone if you want.