Pear note can make a great tool for taking notes on meetings or interviews that occur in the physical world. That said, with a few other tools it can be used for meetings and interviews that occur in the online world as well. One of the most common tools for conducting online meetings and interviews is Skype, so I’ll use it as the example here (though you can probably translate these instructions to other apps as well). To record a Skype conversation, do the following:

1. Download Soundflower and install it (along with the Soundflowerbed app that comes with it)
2. Download LineIn and install it
3. Start Soundflowerbed, and select Built-in Output (or whatever output you’d like to listen to the conversation on)
4. Start LineIn, and select your microphone (e.g. Built-in Mic) as the input and Soundflower (2ch) as the output, then press Pass Thru
5. Open Pear Note Preferences, select Recording, and select Soundflower (2ch) as the audio device
6. Open Skype Preferences, select Audio, and select Soundflower (2ch) as the audio output and your microphone (e.g. Built-in Mic) as the audio input
7. Hit record in Pear Note and make your Skype call

Note that you’ll hear yourself as well as the other person while recording. If you’d rather not hear yourself, you can modify which channels are sent from LineIn through the Advanced interface and then customize which channels are being monitored in Soundflowerbed. This will eliminate hearing yourself during recording. Your voice will still be recorded in Pear Note, you just won’t hear it live.

I’m planning to post about different ways to use Pear Note and features that you might not notice at first, but I figure I should probably start by telling you how I’ve been using Pear Note. I’m involved in meetings on a fairly regular basis. These are most often design meetings, where we discuss aspects of the design of something that we’re building and make decisions about how to proceed. The biggest problem I have is remembering all those decisions down the road. I’ve tried for years to take better notes to make sure I get down all the decisions made, but I’ve always failed to get everything.

Pear Note has completely changed this. I use Pear Note to take notes and record audio (I don’t really need video for my purposes). A week later, when I’m trying to remember some particular detail that I know we discussed for half an hour but can’t remember what conclusion was made, I turn to my notes. Before Pear Note, I’d usually have something about the discussion written down, but often not the resolution. With Pear Note, I have the same problem, but I now have a solution. I simply press play, click on the text of that particular discussion, perhaps fast forward a bit, and I can listen to where we left it. This is so helpful that I even have others come to me to play back my notes when they can’t remember what was said as well.