Mon 27 Feb 2006
Anyone who’s done interview transcription themselves knows that it’s both necssary and a giant, unimaginable time-suck. When I’m getting towards the end of a 2 hour interview that took place in a loud cafe, I know I’m about to poke my eyes out. So I try to send them out to transcription services whenever possible. It isn’t cheap though, so sometimes we’re stuck.
Through the Anthrodesign list I learned of a new, free (Shareware) application called transScriber. It’s a simple and functional tool for playing back transcription audio while you’re typing it into a word processor. I like that it’s unencumbered and easy to use - you load the sound file into the app. and it sits in the background while you work in MS Word or whatever. To access the audio controls you just hold down the Alt key and hit an arrow key. Up is start/stop, left and right are for stepping back and forth in 10 second chunks. You can also set bookmarks by hitting the down key, but it looks like there is no way to save them if you quit the program. It supports a wide variety of audio formats, at the moment MP3, MP4, AAC, WAV, AIFF, GSM, and G.711.
So, I like tranScriber, but all things considered, I’d definitely choose Express Scribe (which I blogged about last year) instead. On the one hand, Express Scribe doesn’t do bookmarks, and transScriber’s Alt-function keys are nice compared to Express Scribe’s use of the function keys at the top of the keyboard. I found hitting ‘F7′ and ‘F8′ with any speed required a lot of accuracy since my hands have to move from the typing position. Alt - arrow is much easier. On the other hand, Express Scribe is also free, does everything transScriber does, and has a ton of flexibility and features:
- Supports foot pedals
- Lets you customize the playback speed, supports slow playback
- Let’s you customize the FWD and REW jump lengths
- Remembers audio position across sessions
- Supports a VERY long list of file formats
Still, you’ve gotta give transScriber’s author Mads Rydahl a huge amount of credit. He built the software from scratch to help out his girlfriend who is a social anthropologists. That’s get you points!!!
February 28th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
if you’re on a Mac, Transcriva (google it) is damn good.
March 15th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Hi Jantin,
I am the author of transScriber, and I just stumbled across your blog while googling around; And first of all, thank you for writing about my app, and thanks for all the praises :-))
I need to correct you on a couple of points, though because actually, transScriber does most of what you credit ExpressScribe for and even more: it *does* remember your bookmarks and playback position between sessions, it does have slow playback (hold alt+down for 1+ secs.), and while I still have to make the jump lengths configurable, you can customize the unique “auto rewind” feature to skip back anywhere between 0 and 30 secs. A feature that most amateur transcribers find extremely useful.
Once again thanks for the review and happy blogging!
/mads