Do you record your sessions? (Question!)

Our game group has limited time to play, and we've had to go months between sessions due to scheduling conflicts and time constraints.

When we do play, we frequently find ourselves getting distracted, and thus feel a pressure to make the most of what good focused time we have.

I'm our general historian, but I've found that my taking notes has begun to seriously slow down the flow, especially during RP experiences.

So my question is this:

Does anyone record their sessions to craft journal entries/overall game history afterwards, and if so, what apps (iPhone or iPad) or programs (PC) do you use to accomplish this?


Edit:
I currently type notes into OneNote, but I'm looking for suggestions for vocal recording, so I can skip taking notes by hand at the table all together.

(Thanks in advance!)

Great question!

I use my iPad as a player at the table. I start a journal with permissions hidden and take what I will call raw notes. I type from my characters perspective and spell name quickly as they sound. Later or during downtime I edit my notes into a better journal and add references or npcs mentioned in my journal. I think the raw quick notes is the key, otherwise the process of note taking sould note overdhadow what you do with your character.

When it is clean I set the permissions back so others can read it. If the task drags into a day or more and we have new journals above my hidden one I quote my own hidden journal, remove the quotes and so that it is chronologicly new. Then delete hidden journal.

I also always begin my character journal with my character pic.




Regards

Ah! Sorry, I wasn't clear in my original post. I'll edit.

I currently type notes into OneNote, but I'm looking for suggestions for vocal recording, so I can skip taking notes by hand at the table all together.

I mostly go by memory when I post a session recap I have been thinking about purchasing a digital voice recorder thou. The dowside is you would have to go through how ever many hours your session takes to get everything you need.

I try to keep up with the story with session by session notes, but since I don't have Eidetic Memory myself I often leave it to picking apart the journal posts of my players to try to keep track. I get all of them together and put it into a section I call the "Story so Far". Seems to work out pretty good, we'll see how it continues as the game progresses.

all our sessions are recorded... ofcourse its played on skype, so its easy to do it.

Of a few minuses we have, one of the pluses is that my groups tend to all always have good note takers. Not only are we able to review pretty easily, there's also different points of view offered.

While we have a few pieces of game sessions recorded, you know, when the DM (me) is obviously going to make an @$$ of himself -- in watching a few game recording out there it's mostly nothing. Unless you are going basically, "produce" a video it seems useless.

Like you're have to cut up the session on video in to a few pieces, just to be able to work with it and at the very least to be useful for review you'll need to be able to cut out non-essential video.

What I mean is, a 3-4 hour video isn't really useful for review because I don't think people have that kind of time -- which is why I think basic notes , condensing what happened, will still work best.

a video no. But an audio actual play podcast, people listen to. Actually people love it, especially for work, they can do work, and listen to something and generate ideas in there head.

I'm not looking to use the recording for anything but my own notes, because there is nothing more jarring the to have to attempt to take notes while you're roleplaying a scene between youreself and another player - you're always going to miss out of some witty retort because you'll have to take notes after, or risk ruining the flow. combat moves too quickly to take notes during, at least when people know their attacks well...etc.

My groups use MapTools, and we force ourselves to do In Character(IC) chat in the chat function of MapTools and Out of Character (OOC) chat in Ventrilo. I have recorded sessions in Ventrilo, as sometimes we forget ourselves in intense combat or riddles or RP and slip, but it is tedious listening thru 4 hrs of chaff to find little wheat. If I could find a good Voice-to-text program that could convert this semi reliably and with time blocks, I would use audio recording more.