Dad recorded interviews on a cassette, carried spare batteries like a man who had been burned before, and then lost an evening typing the whole thing up by hand. Two of those three problems are gone. The third one, the interview itself, is exactly as hard as it always was, and that is the part worth your attention.
Your phone is the recorder
The voice recorder app on your phone is good enough for most interviews. It records clean audio, it is always with you, and it backs up while you sleep. That is the whole pitch.
Two upgrades earn their place. A cheap clip-on microphone gets the voice off the noisy room and into something you can actually transcribe later, and Rode's little wireless mics (Australian made, half the newsroom owns one) do this for not much money. And for anything that really matters, a court result, a one-shot interview with someone who will never talk to you again, carry a dedicated recorder like a Zoom H1essential as a second copy. Two recordings of the big one is not paranoia. It is the job.
Transcription that does the typing
This is the bit that would have saved Dad those lost evenings. AI transcription tools now turn an hour of audio into a rough transcript in a couple of minutes. Otter, Whisper-based apps, the transcription built into the tools you already pay for, they are all close enough to useful.
One rule, and it is not optional. The machine gets names, numbers and anything legally sensitive wrong often enough that you always read the transcript against the audio before you quote from it. The transcript is a draft, not gospel. Treat it the way Dad treated a junior's first par, with suspicion and a red pen.
The law and the courtesy
Recording someone is not a free-for-all. Consent law in Australia varies by state, and a private conversation is treated differently from a public one, so know the rule where you are before you hit record. When in doubt, tell the person you are recording. It is both safer and the decent thing to do, and it has a way of making them more careful and more quotable, not less.
For the ethics and the discipline in full, go to Dad's pieces on interviewing and on getting people to talk. This guide is about the kit, not the rules.
Back it up so you never lose it
The only recording is the one you still have. Let it sync to the cloud automatically, keep a second copy for anything important, and name the file something you will recognise in two years, not "New Recording 47".
What stays the same
The questions. The listening. The silence you leave so the other person fills it. Dad's whole factsheet was about getting a human being to tell you something true, and no app does that for you. Read the original here: Recording Interviews Successfully.