In most states, it’s completely legal to record a telephone conversation that you’re a part of without the other parties knowing. You can even record a conversation that you’re not a part of, as long as you have consent from at least one person involved in the call.

However, there are a few states that require everyone in the conversation to be aware of recordings for it to be legal. California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Washington are just several of the fourteen states that demand it.

Unfortunately, since smartphone makers can’t make their devices with each state in mind, they tend to do what’s best as a whole. In this case, that’s leaving out the call recording option entirely.

Some actually include it, but disable it based on region, like Samsung did with the Galaxy Note 2. So, if you have a Note 2, it’s totally possible to bring back that hidden voice call recording feature.

Method #1: Installing SecPhone (Root Required)

SecPhone allows you to record phone calls by simply pressing a button on your call screen. Pretty handy, right? It will record both voice calls, as long as one isn’t using a Bluetooth mic.

To install the SecPhone mod onto your Galaxy Note 2, you’ll just need to flash either the XXDMB2/4 Odex/Deodex or XXDMB5 Odex/Deodex zip files, depending on your model, to your rooted device via recovery mode.

Once your phone reboots, you should have the recording capability right on your phone interface.

Method #2: Google Play Apps (No Root Needed)

If you don’t have a rooted Galaxy Note 2 (and don’t want to root), but still want to have call recording capabilities on your device, there are several phone recording apps on Google Play that’ll do the trick.

• Record My Call is one of the most popular free call recording apps on the market. But, you have to always carry out your conversation on loudspeaker, because it can only record incoming and outgoing calls from your phone’s microphone. That’s why the rooted method above is good, because it bypasses this restriction, but this is a good non-root alternative.

• Call Recorder is another free and popular call recording app, but with many more features such as recording all of your voice calls, locking recorded items to prevent from auto-cleaning, enabling/disabling notifications, and changing the recording source, quality, and channel.

If you don’t mind paying, there’s also Total Recall and Call Recorder, but they’re like ten bucks each.