Recording and Playing Back Conversations

The CATI Supervisor module allows you to record the interviewing process, called Deferred Monitoring (go to Live Call Monitoring, Recordings and Playback for more information). To enable deferred monitoring, the Enable whole interview audio recording option must be enabled on the Survey Settings > CATI Options tab for the survey in the Forsta Authoring module (refer to the Authoring documentation for details).

The supervisor can review the audio recording using the Call Management dialog interface controls. Recorded audio files can be played either directly from the dialing system server, or downloaded and played locally. The file name and extension are displayed in the Audio Player dialog box.

Playing Back the Recorded Interview

1. To check which interviews contain recorded audio tracks, click the Retrieve Audio button in the Call Management dialog.

The Interview/call list is refreshed, and all interviews that have an audio recording available for playback are highlighted in the list in the Call Management window - the Interview ID cell for such interview turns yellow.

2. Right-click the required interview in the list in the Call Management window and choose Play Audio from the context menu that appears.

The built-in audio player utility starts in a separate window. Playback of the audio track starts automatically.



Figure 1 - Playing back audio track from the recorded interview

Control the playback process using the controls in the audio player window.

• The dialog header shows the survey ID and the interview ID.
• The grid below the standard audio player control elements displays the list of files containing recorded audio tracks pertaining to the selected interview.

Note that an interview may have more than one audio file. This indicates that the interview has first been paused and then continued. Each interview section is then stored as a separate audio file.

• The Recording Time column shows the time the recording was saved. Use the button to the left of the timestamp to start and stop the playback.
• The Link column contains a direct link to the audio file with the interview recording. Click this link to start playback of the file in your default Windows media player application.

Right-click a link to display the standard browser context menu. Use the commands in the context menu to save the selected file locally or play it in the default audio player application.

Remember that any audio file containing an interview recording can be saved and reviewed later.

3. Click the action menu button located to the right of the playback progress bar to display the Download command, and click this command to download the audio file into the default location on your computer.

The playback will stop after the audio track finishes. You can repeat playback of the same interview, or you can close the audio player window by pressing the Close button.

4. Repeat the procedure from step 2 to play back the audio track from another interview.