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We recently added a small but very useful feature to CRIMS: Autosuggest. This feature provides you with automatic suggestions on possible value when you want to share a call record or when you are doing an advanced search. Here’s some screenshots of it in action.

Its a small change but it helps immensely and saves a lot of typing. Thanks to Pat for suggesting this feature.

The update we did yesterday unfortunately broke the upload functionality. It was because of the unicode changes we had done. The issue has been fixed with version 1.0.6.7. Please update if you are facing the issue.

The nice folks at Soft32Downloads have evaluated Call Graph and given the 5 stars award to Call Graph.

To quote directly from their mail

I am sending you this email because your software product named Call Graph has been tested on 26 Aug 2008 and has been found by our team a high quality software product. Also, we were impressed by the cleanliness of your program. According to our classification and to our test results, we decided to grant your product, Call Graph , with a 5/5 Stars Rating and “5 stars award award”. This award means that your product is a Premium Software.

A big thanks to the Soft32Download team for their work.

Version 1.0.6.6 is out. Here’s a list of changes that went in.

We added support for Unicode in this release. So you can use any characters in your call record names, tags etc. It should also not complain if index.xml files have Umlaut, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese etc. characters in them. This was a much requested feature from our users.

A recommended transcription settings button in the configuration dialog, recordings page. This sets the parameters which we recommend if you want to get your call record transcribed by us. Thanks to Tim for suggesting this feature.

During the association process, if we detect that your firewall is preventing us from accessing the website, we show a warning now. This was preventing some of our users from completing the association process. Similarly for the ‘Check for updates’ operation.

Earlier if Call Graph was running and you tried to start it again from the start menu then we used to show a message saying ‘Another instance is running, aborting’. That has been removed now. It now brings up the toolbar of the already running process.

The toolbar was enhanced and now it has a more descriptive status bar and a button for the configuration dialog. The status bar has links to be blog for common problems that are encountered and tips on how to resolve them.

There was a bug in the ‘Run at startup’ option which prevented Call Graph from being started during computer boot up. That has been fixed now. Thanks to Mathew for pointing it out.

It also contains numerous other bug fixes.

What’s Next:

Faster startup, better history UI, tighter integration with the web service etc. Stay tuned.

As usual, feedback is welcome. Send us a mail or leave a comment if you want.

If you get this notification then your recorded conversation will be garbled and filled with breaks. Try the following steps to resolve the issue.

• Try setting the mp3 encoding parameters to 16KHz sampling rate and 64 kpbs bit rate.
• Switch to wav file encoding instead of mp3.
• Check how much CPU time is being consumed by CG when recording. If its more than 20% then close some applications on your PC and try again.

This is usually an indication of a more serious issue on your setup. Leave a comment or get in touch with us here in case you need more help.

We did a major revamp of the CRIMS UI. We had been working on this for sometime now and we spent time on it to make it more responsive, cleaner and intuitive. Here’s a short description of what has changed.

Popups:

The popups for Edit Tags, Rename, Share and Delete files have been removed. Instead of that we have introduced ‘Edit In Place’ dialog. When you click on these links, a small dialog opens up on the same page to take in the input. Much better than navigating to a different page. Here’s a screen shot of the ‘Share’ operation.

The functionality of removing each share individually has also been added.

The delete file brings up a modal dialog now. The batch operations also show you a modal dialogs instead of popups.

Widgets:

Two new widgets, help and support have been added. They are on all the pages now: Transcripts, Upgrade, Add Machines etc.

Clicking on the help option brings up the modal dialog now. The help text also has been revamped.

Icons:

Icons have been added to the main message bar on each of the pages. For any action they show the result there. If an error occurss during an operation, the text turns red to alert you.

What’s Next:

Autosuggest, color scheme change and more. Stay tuned.

Do let us know what you think of these changes. And thanks for using Call Graph once again.

For high quality voice recordings of your Skype conversation, please use the following settings

• Recording Mode: Stereo – 2 channels
• Sampling Rate: 16000 Hz
• Bit Rate: 128 kbps

The first three can be configured from the ‘Recording’ tab of the configuration dialog. The last two are in the ‘Advanced’ Tab.

Tips:

• First and foremost, use a headset instead of the inbuilt speaker and mic. It helps to keep the background noise to the minimum and reduces the possibility of any echo during the call.
• If you get an echo then drop the call and try again. If possible, record a test call first and play it back to make sure things are fine.
• For SkypeOut and Conference calls, ensure that the call quality is good enough before you start the recording. Make a few test calls before the actual one if possible.
• Close all other applications which might use your internet bandwidth during that period. Usual browsing should not interfere but downloads or uploads (or BitTorrent) severely hampers the call quality.
• If possible, reboot your machine once before you start on the call. It clears up the memory and performs better.
• Finally, keep an eye on the status displayed at the bottom of the Toolbar as well during the call. It should be showing ‘Recording in progress’. If not restart the call and the recording.

Explanation:

Technically speaking, these settings are optimal for our system. The Speech Recognition engine that we use works in the wideband mode (16 kHz) and the 128 kbps bit rate preserves the optimal voice quality in the mp3 files. Encoding in two track mode enables us to split up each of the track separately and process them.

If you have more questions then feel free to leave a comment or contact us.

Our weekly update of the recording client is out, version 1.0.6.5. Apart from the several bug fixes, it also contains a new feature: the recording toolbar.

This toolbar appears when a incoming/outgoing Skype call is detected and gives you ability to start/stop/pause the recording and view your call record history. It also displays the current status of recording, whether the recording is ongoing or paused or finished. The pause functionality is new in this release. During the call you can use this button to completely skip parts of the conversation from the recording.

The time when the window opens can be configured from the settings dialog. By default it shows up whenever a call is detected. In case you do not want this then check the box next to ‘Show toolbar when recording’ option.

A corresponding popup menu item also has been added. Click on it so see the toolbar at any point of time.

This is the beginning of a series of changes that we have planned to our client. Next up is ability to keep on recording beyond the call finishes. Eg. in cases when call is dropped or when are doing a redial. All of these will be implemented via this particular toolbar.

If you have some suggestion in mind then do send it across. It helps us in filling in the voids in our software.

If you face any problems with Call Graph, then the first thing that we ask you for is the log file. Here’s how to get yours.

Step 1: Right click on the Call Graph task bar icon.

The CG icon is the brown ‘C’ icon on task bar of your computer. If you cannot see it then Call Graph is not running. Please start it from the program menu.

Step 2: Choose ‘Configuration’ from the popup menu. The following dialog box will come up.

Step 3: Click on the ‘Open log file’ link.

A notepad will open up with all the contents of the log file. Copy and paste everything on the mail.

Thats it. Please dont hesitate to contact us if you face any issue.