A Twitter buddy asked me today what application would I recommend for recording Skype conversations, the resulting recordings to be used in podcasts.

That’s the sixth such request I’ve had over the past few weeks. Does it indicate that we’re about to see an upsurge in business podcasting, hopefully proving me wrong when I wondered a few months ago whether business podcasting is dead?

Whatever the reason, if more people are considering podcasting and are looking for an easy way to record conversations over Skype, that’s great.

My answer to the question is simple – CallBurner.

This application for Windows is simplicity itself. It sits quietly in your system tray; when you make or receive a Skype call, it pops up, you click a button and it records.

It works faultlessly for me every time.

I use CallBurner for all the FIR Interview podcasts that I do as well as the IABC Cafe2Go podcasts that I produce.

What I especially like about CallBurner is that you have an option to set it up so that it records to three separate files for each Skype conversation – a compressed MP3 or WMA file of both sides of the conversation together, and then two separate uncompressed WAV files, one for each side of the conversation.

While the compressed file is often good enough for what you’d need – and if you choose MP3, you’re ready to go for your podcast – the option to have separate uncompressed WAV recordings of you and the person on the other end of the Skype call is perfect for detailed editing if you need to do that.

And you can fine-tune your audio recording configuration, a very useful feature.

CallBurner works with all Skype versions since 1.3 (although I haven’t tried it with Skype 4 beta) and with Windows 2000 and up (I’m running it on Vista without any problems).

There are other Windows apps on the market to enable Skype recording – Pamela, for instance, or my old favourite Hot Recorder – yet in my experience, none of the others is as good or as simple to use as CallBurner.

You can try CallBurner for 14 days. You can use it for free if you only want to record Skype-to-Skype conversations. For recording calls to and from normal phone lines, you’ll need the paid version which will cost you $39.95 / €49.95 / $79.95.

So if you want to get up and running very easily with recording Skype conversations, give CallBurner a go and see what you think.

(And what if you have a Mac, not a Windows PC? One product I’ve heard some people talk about is eCamm Call Recorder. I haven’t used it myself, though, as I don’t use a Mac.)