My Frustration with Ringr

…which overall is a very good service for recording podcasts over the internet.

First, please note that I currently pay for the Ringr service and have done so for the past 3 years at least. I don’t actually use it very often but I like to have it handy just in case any of the other services I use fail (Zencastr and Squadcast).

Second, Ringr DOES have several features that are very handy in some situations, like when a guest must join from their mobile phone they can use the Ringr mobile app to connect and record in higher audio quality than standard phone call quality. Also, in general Ringr is a stable platform when accessing it both from a web browser and mobile app.

So here are my frustrations: (in no particular order)

*And if you can illuminate me and others on how to avoid or overcome any of these issues, please share your knowledge with us 😉

1. There is no chat functionality within sessions, so in order to help each other connect properly or troubleshoot any problems (like if you SEE that someone is connected but you can’t HEAR them), participants must struggle to call each other on the phone or Skype in order to figure things out.
2. You are not able to add a participant to a session after starting the session. You must create an entirely new session, again enter ALL the participants email addresses, and then start the new session. And pray that you don’t have to do all this again 5 minutes later in order to add ANOTHER participant.
3. You are not able to stop the recording within a session and then start recording again within the same session. I’m not sure if this is technically possible, but I tried it and everything went haywire because everyone’s files were being uploaded and I could see people but not hear them, etc., so I just ended up creating an entirely new session. Ugh, see above.
4. Ringr doesn’t record frequencies above 11 kHz, which eliminates lots of clarity from every person on every recording. But for some reason AFTER a session Ringr can deliver a recording to you at a full-fidelity sample rate, like 44.1 kHz, BUT the audio WITHIN this “higher quality file” is NOT higher quality in terms of the actual frequency range represented there BECAUSE the original Ringr recordings are only captured at 22 kHz sample rate. So, on the surface, it appears that Ringr can deliver audio at 44.1 kHz but that’s simply not the case.

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