Parallel Stereo Recordings explained: full call, every time

Parallel Stereo Recordings is a Stereo recording feature that runs a second, always-on recording pass alongside whatever the agent is doing. When enabled, every call is captured in its entirety - from the moment the Agent receives it until it leaves the agent session.

What makes it parallel

Standard Call recording and Stereo Recording Agent Control give agents varying degrees of control over when recording starts and stops. Parallel Stereo Recordings runs independently of that. Even if the agent never presses a recording button, the parallel track captures the full call.

This matters in scenarios where agent-controlled recording is set to ONDEMAND or ALLCALLS and an agent stops the recording mid-call. The parallel track keeps running and gives supervisors an unbroken audio record.

Three channel options

When you enable Parallel Stereo Recordings, you pick one of three channel modes:

• CUSTOMER-ONLY - the agent side of the stereo track is silent. Only the customer's audio is recorded.
• CUSTOMER-MUTED - the customer side is silent. Useful for capturing only agent-side audio, for example to verify disclosures without retaining the customer's voice.
• FULL-RECORDING - both channels carry audio. This is the most common choice for QA, voice analytics, and compliance archiving.

How Parallel recording sits alongside agent-controlled recording

sequenceDiagram
  participant Carrier
  participant Dialer
  participant Agent
  participant ParallelTrack
  Carrier->>Dialer: Inbound or outbound call
  Dialer->>Agent: Call sent to agent session
  Dialer->>ParallelTrack: Parallel stereo starts immediately
  Agent->>Agent: Agent-controlled recording may start or stop
  Agent->>Dialer: Agent hangs up or call leaves session
  Dialer->>ParallelTrack: Parallel stereo stops

Multiple recordings on a single call

If Stereo Recording Agent Control is also enabled for the same Campaign, a single call can produce two or more recording files: one from the agent-controlled stereo session and one from the parallel track. This is intentional - the parallel track is a safety net, not a replacement.

**Heads up:** Extra recordings mean extra disk consumption. A full-recording parallel track on a high-volume campaign doubles your stereo storage footprint. Plan your Recording retention and disk capacity accordingly before enabling this in production.

Default state and enabling

Parallel Stereo Recordings defaults to DISABLED. It lives in the campaign settings alongside the other stereo recording fields. Because it always captures the full call, there is no recording delay option for parallel tracks - the delay setting only applies to agent-controlled ALLCALLS and ALLFORCE modes.

For an overview of the full recording system, read VICIdial call recording explained. To understand how filenames are assigned to each parallel track, see Parallel Rec Filenames and the CO, CM, FR prefixes.

Want a fully configured VICIdial environment with stereo and parallel recording ready to go? See VICIfast pricing.