You're about to make an audio recording. Consider how important the content is, you may need it to put together an important deal, it's a research interview, it's for publication, for reference - whatever it is, you need an accurate audio recording - so these tips may help you to get the best result.

Firstly, consider your environment. It may be convenient to meet a customer in a cafe for a meeting, but the background noise will be high. To produce a clean and clear recording, try to find a quiet location. Also it's preferable that no speakers are eating or drinking.

​Secondly, keep in mind that you are being recorded and try to speak clearly without mumbling. If you do have access to a microphone that will help. Try to keep the recording device in a central position close to the speakers. In a larger room, it may be harder to pick up the speakers who are further away.

​Digital audio recorders, and also mobile phones, do provide a fairly good quality recording. We sometimes have recordings of telephone or Skype calls - these can be a bit unclear at times.

​​If there are several speakers, it's useful if you can introduce them at the start of the recording. Our transcriptionists are skilled and used to recognising various speakers, either from their tone of voice, positioning on the recording (left or right), accents and so on. However, for larger focus groups, or where speakers may sound similar, it is not always possible to identify them, although we will do our best.

​Finally, if you do have a list of any proper nouns, unusual words or terms, that may occur in your recording, it would be very helpful if you could provide this, so that together we can produce the most accurate transcript. We do our best to research correct spellings but information like this saves time, and we maybe cannot always find the correct name or word, or even hear it clearly.