Recording Audio

As mentioned in the chapter introduction, you can use OneNote's audio capabilities for several purposes. For example, you can record a quick memo from a Side Note with a couple of clicks. You can use audio for added emphasis within a written or typed note. If you have enough hard drive space and battery life on your laptop or tablet, you can even record an entire meeting. Optionally, you can even forego typing or writing notes and only record audio. This enables you to turn your entire concentration over to the meeting. At a later date, you can play back the audio and take more detailed notes.

You can use OneNote to take high-quality recordings with the right equipment. If you're going to record audio in a noisy environment, invest in a high-quality microphone.

In order to record audio in OneNote, you'll need both a sound card and microphone attached to your computer. A good number of laptops and just about all Tablet PCs come with both a sound card and a microphone. If your computer doesn't have a microphone, you can usually purchase an easy-to-use external microphone for under $50.

Unlike a simple tape recorder (or even a fancy digital voice recorder or MP3 player), recording audio with OneNote gives you the additional benefit of tracking what you were hearing or saying at the time you wrote or typed the note. Sometimes days or weeks after a meeting, you just can't quite place the context of a particular line of text. If you can replay the audio surrounding that line of text, you can probably remember what that line of text meant.

Using Audio Notes to Interact with Colleagues

If you're sharing notes between coworkers, you can use audio notes to enhance the collaboration. For example, in Figure 17.1, you can see a note page with notes from an ongoing budget project. The note page is divided into two sides, one for each person working on the project. Both sides have attached audio notes to clarify the progress of the budget meeting.

Figure 17.1. Using audio can enhance your collaborative efforts.

In order to share audio recordings, it's best to store the OneNote page on a shared network location. This way the audio files are also stored in the network location and are accessible to all users.

As you can see from the figure, each member of the budget team can record their own audio notes to clarify assigned tasks.