How to record your D&D session so the audio is actually usable

Where to put the recorder at a physical table

Put the phone flat on its back, screen up, in the dead center of the table. That is the whole trick. Not propped up, not aimed at anyone, not next to you.

A phone mic picks up speech from all directions well enough that pointing the phone at one player does not make that player clearer. It just makes them closer to the mic than everyone else, which is the problem you are trying to avoid. What matters is distance. On a six-foot table, a phone in the middle puts nobody more than about three feet away. Slide that phone toward the head of the table and the person at the far end is now twice as far from the mic as everyone else, and audibly quieter on the recording.

Set the phone on something soft: a folded t-shirt, a mousepad, a paperback, a spare dice tray. Tables transmit shock straight into the phone body. Dice landing, a can set down, someone leaning on their elbows, a d20 that bounces off the map and hits the case. All of that arrives at the mic as a thump far louder than anything anyone says, and it is the single most common reason a home recording sounds bad.

If your table is long, L-shaped, or you have seven or more people, one recorder in the middle will not reach the ends. Use two phones placed at roughly the one-third and two-thirds points and keep both files. Recording the same session twice also insures you against one of the two failing.

The five-minute check before you press record

Do this every session until it is muscle memory. Almost every ruined recording is one of these five things, not a gear problem.

1. Turn on Do Not Disturb. An incoming call can interrupt or kill a recording outright, and a stack of notification chimes lands directly on top of dialogue.
2. Plug it in. A four-hour recording with the screen off will usually survive on battery, but there is no reason to gamble on a phone that also has forty tabs open. Run the cable off the side of the table so nobody snags it.
3. Check free storage before you start, not after. Four hours of compressed mono audio at typical settings is roughly 200 to 250 MB. Four hours of uncompressed WAV is well over a gigabyte.
4. Do a thirty-second test. Record, have the quietest person at the table say a sentence from their actual seat, stop, and play it back on the phone speaker. If they are hard to make out now, in a quiet room, with you leaning in to listen, they will be unusable four hours later.
5. Start recording before the recap of last session, not after. The five minutes where someone reminds everyone what happened last time is often the most useful five minutes on the whole file.

Choosing and prepping the room

Steady background noise hurts more than loud one-off noises. A dog barking once is a two-second problem. A box fan running for four hours degrades every single word.

Before you start, turn off the ceiling fan, the air conditioner, the air purifier, and the dishwasher. Close the windows. If someone objects to the heat, run the AC hard for ten minutes before play and then kill it, or agree to run it during the break.

Soft rooms beat hard rooms. Carpet, curtains, a couch, and bodies all absorb reflections. A tiled kitchen or a bare dining room makes voices ring and smear together, which is exactly the quality that turns a transcript into mush. You do not need acoustic panels. Throwing coats over the back of a chair and playing on a rug does most of the work.

Also close the door to whatever room the TV is in, and do not set up next to the refrigerator.

How to record an online game on Discord, Zoom, or OBS

The mistake that catches almost everyone the first time: your computer microphone records you and your room. It does not record the other players. Their voices come out of your headphones or speakers and never reach the mic. If you hit record in a voice memo app during a Discord game, you get four hours of yourself talking to nobody.

You need to capture the computer's own audio output as well as your mic. Three ways that work, in the order most groups should try them, plus a test that applies to all three.

• Discord with the Craig bot. Invite Craig to your server, have it join the voice channel, and it records everyone. The important part is that it produces a separate track per speaker. Separate tracks mean no crosstalk, so a transcription tool gets clean single-voice audio and you already know who is on which track instead of guessing. This is the best option for Discord games by a wide margin. It is free, with limits on recording length and on how long your files stay downloadable, so check what those currently are before you rely on it for a five-hour session.
• Zoom's built-in recording. As host, choose local recording and it captures everyone in the call. Depending on your recording settings, Zoom writes an audio-only file alongside the video, and it can also write one file per participant if you enable that option, which gives you the same per-speaker advantage as Craig. If you are not the host you need the host to grant recording permission.
• OBS Studio. Free, and it works with anything you can hear, including Roll20, Foundry, Google Meet, or a mix of a video call and a separate audio channel. Add Desktop Audio as a source alongside your microphone, and in the advanced output settings assign them to separate audio tracks so you can balance them later. On Windows this works out of the box. On macOS, capturing system audio needs either a recent OBS version with application audio capture or a free virtual audio device such as BlackHole. It is more setup than the other two, and it is the one that never leaves you stuck.
• Whichever you pick, do a sixty-second test with one friend on a weeknight before you rely on it for a real session. Play it back and confirm you can hear both yourself and them.

Cheap gear that actually helps

Placement and room beat equipment. A phone in the middle of a quiet carpeted room will beat an expensive microphone in a bad spot every time. That said, a few small purchases genuinely earn their money.

A wired lavalier mic, usually $15 to $25, clipped to the collar of the one player who mumbles or speaks toward their character sheet, running into a second phone. This solves the specific problem of one person being unintelligible, which no amount of table-center placement will fix.

A USB conference mic, the puck-shaped speakerphone kind, is the honest upgrade for a table of five or six. They are built for exactly this job: one device in the middle of a table picking up voices in a circle. If you also play online sometimes, it doubles as your call mic.

A cheap phone stand or small tripod mostly earns its keep by getting the phone off the table surface and out of the thump path. A folded towel does the same thing for free.

What not to buy: a large directional podcast microphone. Those are designed to hear one person in front of them and reject everything else, which is the opposite of what a table needs. For online play, the highest-value purchase is not for you at all. It is convincing each player to use a cheap headset instead of laptop speakers, which eliminates echo and open-mic room noise at the source.

Mistakes that quietly ruin an otherwise fine recording

Every one of these produces a file that sounds fine when you spot-check it and falls apart when you actually need it.

• Recorder next to the dice tray. Every roll is a burst of noise straight into the mic, and rolls happen at the exact moments something important is being said.
• Recorder in front of the loudest player. Most phone recording apps ride the level automatically. One booming voice up close forces the level down for everyone else, so your quiet players get quieter every time the loud one speaks.
• Ambient music playing through a speaker in the room. It sits under everything, it cannot be cleanly removed afterward, and it competes with dialogue for the same frequencies. If you want a soundtrack, play it during the break or route it to headphones.
• Something on top of the mic. A bag of chips, a battle map, a rulebook, a character sheet slid across the table. Glance at the phone once an hour.
• Picking the phone up mid-session to check something. Handling noise is enormous, and people stop the recording by accident.
• Recording with the video camera app. You get a huge file, mic processing tuned for video, and it lands in a camera roll where it is easy to lose.
• Never confirming it started. Look at the running timer thirty seconds in. Look again after the break, because the break is where recordings die.

File format, length, and splitting a long session

For speech, compressed audio is fine. M4A or MP3 at around 128 kbps is plenty, and recording in mono rather than stereo lets you drop the bitrate without losing any intelligibility, because a table recording carries no meaningful stereo information anyway. Only use WAV if you plan to edit the audio heavily; four hours of stereo WAV is well over two gigabytes and buys you nothing for a conversation.

At those settings a four-hour session lands somewhere around 200 to 250 MB, which sits comfortably under the upload limits most tools impose. DM Scribe, for reference, accepts files up to 500 MB, so a normal session goes up in one piece.

If a session runs very long, or you recorded in a high-quality format and blew past a size limit, split the file rather than re-encoding it into mush. Split at the mid-session break, not at an arbitrary timestamp, so you are not cutting a sentence in half. Audacity is free and does this in a few clicks; ffmpeg does it from the command line without re-encoding at all. Name the parts clearly, like session-12-part-1 and session-12-part-2, and keep them in order.

Copy the file off the phone the same night. Cloud drive, laptop, anywhere. Phones get dropped, and the recording of a session is the one thing you cannot re-create.

Asking your table for consent before you record

Ask before the first session you record, out loud, with everyone present. Not by text afterward, and not quietly to the person sitting next to you.

Say four things: what you are recording, what you will use it for, who will be able to see it, and how long you will keep it. If the answer is that you are recording so you can write a recap and keep a campaign wiki, that it stays on your own machine or account, and that players get the recap, that is an easy yes for most groups.

If someone is uncomfortable, that is the end of it. One holdout means no recording, and you go back to notes. It is not worth a friendship, and recording someone who does not want to be recorded is not something to negotiate around. Recording laws also vary by state and country and are worth a look if your group is spread out.

Agree on a pause signal. A raised hand, or just saying pause the recorder, for the moments when table talk turns personal. Honor it immediately and out loud, so people trust it.

Consent to record for your own notes is not consent to publish. If you later want to post clips, share the raw audio, or make the transcript public, that is a separate question you ask separately. If you use a Discord recording bot, tell your players which one and when it is running; Craig, for instance, announces in the channel that recording has started.

What good enough audio actually means

You are not making a podcast. You do not need a studio, a mixer, or a treated room. You need a recording where everyone is audible and people mostly do not talk over each other.

Here is the test. Pick a random thirty seconds from the middle of the file, play it on a laptop speaker at half volume, and see if you can follow it without straining. If you can, that recording is good enough for anything you would reasonably want to do with it, including having software transcribe it.

Two table habits are worth more than any gear you can buy. First, use names out loud. When you say Kaelen, the guard is looking right at you, both the humans listening back and any transcription tool get a free anchor for who is doing what. Second, protect the moments that matter. Combat crosstalk is going to be messy and that is fine; nobody needs a clean record of six people arguing about flanking. But when a player makes an actual decision, or an NPC gives their name, give it two seconds of clear air.

Expect the first recording to be imperfect. Listen to ten minutes of it the next day, fix the one thing that went wrong, and by session three you will have a setup you never think about again.