How to stop recording very short calls with Recording Delay

If you record every call automatically, a big chunk of your files are useless. They are answering machines, instant hangups, and dead air where nobody picked up properly. You can stop writing those files entirely with one setting: Recording Delay. This is the practical how-to.

The setting to change

Open the campaign you want to fix and find the Recording delay field. It is a number in seconds. Set it to 10. That tells the recorder to wait ten seconds before it starts capturing audio on any call. If a call ends inside that window, no file is created at all. The default is 0, which records everything from the first second.

There is one prerequisite. The delay only applies when Call recording is automatic, meaning your Campaign Recording mode is ALLCALLS or ALLFORCE. If your campaign uses on-demand recording where the agent presses a button, there is no automatic start to delay, so the setting does nothing. Confirm your recording mode first, then set the delay.

Steps to apply it

flowchart TD
  A[Open the campaign] --> B[Check Campaign Recording is ALLCALLS or ALLFORCE]
  B --> C[Set Recording Delay to 10]
  C --> D[Submit the campaign]
  D --> E[Short calls now produce no file]
  E --> F[Review recorded calls for cut greetings]

1. Open the campaign and confirm Campaign Recording is set to ALLCALLS or ALLFORCE.
2. Set Recording Delay to 10 seconds as a starting point.
3. Submit the campaign so the change takes effect.
4. Listen to a few recorded calls afterward to make sure you are not clipping useful audio.

Tuning the value

Ten seconds clears out most of the noise. Most machine pickups and quick hangups happen well inside that window, especially the ones flagged by AMD (answering machine detection). The cost is that the first ten seconds of every recorded call are missing, so the agent greeting may not be captured. If your quality team scores the opening, drop the delay to 5 and check whether that is enough. If you record only for proof of a completed sale, you can leave it at 10 or higher.

Watch out for one interaction. If you use Routing Initiated Recording on auto-dial calls, that path only works on agent manual dialed calls when the recording delay is set to 0. You cannot have both a delay and routing-triggered recording on manual dials at the same time, so decide which one matters more for that campaign.

It also helps to know what the delay is not. It does not filter by call result or disposition; it filters purely by how long the call stays connected. A real conversation that happens to end inside the window will be skipped too, and a long machine message that drones on past the window will still be recorded. The delay is a blunt time-based gate, which is exactly why a short value like 10 works well: it catches the brief dead calls without making assumptions about content. If you need precise control over which results get recorded, that belongs in your recording mode and dispositions, not the delay.

There is a real load benefit on top of the disk savings. Every recording the server starts costs CPU to capture and encode, plus a write to disk. On a heavy outbound campaign, the calls that die in the first few seconds can be a large share of total dials, so not opening those files takes measurable pressure off the box at exactly the busiest moments. If your servers run hot during peak hours, a recording delay is one of the quieter ways to ease the strain without touching your dial pacing.

Skipping short calls is the simplest part of keeping recording storage sane. The setting that decides the recording itself is covered in detail in what Recording Delay does, and the wider recording picture is in our call recording guide.

If you would rather not manage any of this yourself, our hosted dialers ship with sensible recording defaults. Take a look at our pricing to compare plans.