Today I found myself the victim of my own pursuit of new technologies, so I thought I'd share what happened to help anyone reading avoid a similar entanglement.

Like many VoIP practitioners and bloggers, I have a variety of VoIP, chat,  and IM clients installed. I've got Counterpaths X-Lite, the Pulver Communicatior, Gizmo, Skype, MSN, and at least 2-3 others installed right now. While I often talk about the security concerns Skype raises in the enterprire network, make no mistake, I am a big fan of Skype. I use it for PC-to-PC calls, for SkypeIn and SkypeOut. My SkypeIn number is my office number in my home office. I use Skype on my Treo too.

A week or two ago, news of a new Skype 2.6 beta circulated, and being the bleeding edge kinda guy I am, I went and installed. It worked perfectly. And I look forward to be moving from beta to production.

One tool I ised for VoIP cll recording, mostly for podcasting, is HotRecorder. For $15 I don't think it can be beat for simplicity and value. But Skype has a nasty problem with beta software not always working with other tools. Thanks to Phoneboy for making me thinking about that today. I uninstalled and reinstalled Hor Recorder 5 or 6 tmes throughout the day trying to figure out what was wrong. And the bottom line was HotRecorder was fine. The Skype beta just wouldn't work with it.

As a result, my recorded call this morning with Dan Miller yielded a 0 byte file and no audio. I fought with it, couldn't solve it and didn't ever try recording when I spoke with Terry Leach. I knew it wasn't working.

Now I've uninstalled Skype 2.6 and reinstalled the 2.5 production release and magically everything works as it should.

I confess, I felt stupid. But it happens to all of us. If you experiment with a wide variety of software, or beta software, you're assured of getting bit at some point. Probably more than once. So pay attention to changes you make in your own system. It'll help you recover quickly. Once I figured it out today, I was back to normal operation in less than ten minutes.


Technorati Tags: tech tip, Skype, HotRecorder, VoIP, VoIP recordinge