How to Record Your In-Person
D&D Sessions

Equipment

We polled hundreds of Archivist users across our community. No single setup dominated, but the most common setups use equipment your group likely already has, including your cell phone, and that's enough for an accurate recording.

Post-Processing

Post-processing is needed when something is actually wrong, such as editing or rebalancing the audio. For example, when one player drowns out everyone else, or there's a lot of ambient noise in the background.

Community-Sourced Audacity Workflow (Free)

This 3-step flow comes from GMs in our community who clean up session recordings in Audacity.

1. Amplify raises a quiet recording to a usable volume. Use it when the whole file sounds too faint. In Audacity: Effect > Amplify, accept the default.
2. Compress evens out loud and quiet voices so no one player dominates. Use it when one voice is much louder than the rest. In Audacity: Effect > Compressor, start with the defaults.
3. Loudness Normalize is a final pass to level the overall volume before export. Use it last. In Audacity: Effect > Loudness Normalization, keep the default target.

What Not to Do Before Uploading

• Don't speed up audio to save time. Upload at normal playback speed.
• Don't reduce bitrate to shrink file size. Higher-quality audio produces better transcripts.

For multi-track lapel mic setups: add Noise Reduction, High Pass Filter, and a noise gate before the steps above. For professional setups, acoustic tiles and curtains in the room help cut bleed between mics.

Best Practices

Before You Start Recording

• Consent: Tell your players you're recording, explain how the audio will be used, and who has access. Recording without consent is illegal in many jurisdictions.
• Test: Record two minutes of normal table chatter and listen back through headphones before play starts. Move the phone closer to quiet players, farther from loud ones, if levels sound uneven.
• Table & room: Dice on hard surfaces produce loud cracks, so dice trays help. Soft surfaces like rugs or bookshelves cut echo. Background hums and fans are easy to ignore during play but show up clearly in a test recording, so fix what you can before you start.
• Session intro: Say the campaign name, session number, and date aloud at the start of every recording. Saves confusion when you have dozens of files.

For Better Transcription Results

• Minimize cross-talk: Multiple people speaking at once hurts transcription accuracy more than almost anything else at the table.
• Third-person references: Encourage third-person references when natural ("Theron enters the tavern" rather than "I enter the tavern") so lines are easier to attribute, assuming your transcription tool doesn't identify speakers.
  →Archivist identifies speakers automatically, so third-person references aren't required. See below.

After the Session

• Naming: Use consistent naming conventions with campaign name, session and episode numbers, and dates. For example: CampaignName_S02E07_2026-06-14.mp3
• Backup: Save the raw file right away to a cloud folder, external drive, or both.
• Join tracks: If your recorder split the session into multiple files, merge them before uploading. The same applies to most multi-track setups if your transcription tool only accepts a single file.
  →Archivist supports multi-track upload, so joining files isn't required or encouraged. Multi-track is always cleaner than single-track. See below.

A structured session recap means your whole table arrives next week knowing what happened, without anyone rewatching three hours of audio.