Is there any software that supports you to manually transcribe content from audio files (like ogg, mp3) to text?
10 Answers
When you have to transcribe, i.e. type, content that comes from an audio file, you want to
- be able to control audio (stop, pause, play) via the keyboard while typing the text (so you do not have to leave the text editor and switch to an audio application to do just that).
- You might also want to adjust the audio speed (to speed up slow speech and slow down too fast speech).
- You want the audio position to be a little bit rewinded when you continue audio playback, just to be sure you didn't miss anything.
I found that a software called transcribe (launchpad) provides the solution I was looking for.
You type the text in a text editor while transcribe plays the audio file in another window. To pause or continue audio playback, you use any keyboard shortcut that you configured system-wide for audio in the system settings. I use F7 to pause, F8 to continue.
To install transcribe:
First, you have to add a PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:frederik-elwert/transcribe
sudo apt-get update
Then you can install it:
sudo apt-get install transcribe
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1
Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/frederik-elwert/transcribe/ubuntu/dists/wily/main/binary-amd64/Packages
... Feb 22, 2016 at 9:38 -
List of transcription programs
There is this comprehensive list of transcription software:
Name Main category Second category Platform License form
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Anvil Transcription Linux, Mac Open Source
casualtranscriber Transcription Mac Freeware
EasyTranscript Transcription Linux, Mac, Win Open Source
ELAN Transcription Linux, Mac, Win Open Source
EXMARaLDA Transcription Linux, Mac, Win Open Source
Express Scribe Transcription Mac Commercial
F4/F5 Transcription Mac, Win Commercial
f4analyse QDA Transcription Linux, Mac, Win Commercial
Feldpartitur Transcription QDA Web Commercial
Folker Transcription Win Free
HyperTranscribe Transcription Mac Commercial
inqscribe Transcription Mac, Win Commercial
MEPA QDA Transcription Win Freeware
Multitool Transcription Mac, Win Open Source
pmTrans Transcription Linux, Mac, Win Open Source
Praat Transcription Linux, Mac, Unix, Win Open Source
Sonal QDA Transcription Win Freeware
SoundScriber Transcription Win Open Source
Transana QDA Transcription Mac, Win Commercial
Transcribe Transcription Linux Open Source
TranscriberAG Transcription Linux, Mac, Win Open Source
Transcriva Transcription Mac Commercial
trAVis Transcription Web Free
xtrans Transcription Linux, Win Open Source
And another list on the German Ubuntu wiki with instructions on how to use Audacious and VLC with global hotkeys together with a text editor of your choice.
Personally I use smplayer (a graphical front-end for mplayer), where you can press a keyboard key to change the speed of playback, move back and forward easily in three different steps (default is 10 seconds, 1 minute and 10 minutes I think, which could be easily changed to e.g. 2 sec, 5 sec and 30 sec).
The player is cross-plattform and free software (GPL).
As editor I use vim with spellchecking.
Playitslowly
This nice and lightweight software aims at changing playback speed of recorded files but also has nice features useful for transcription. For more details and a screenshot see:
Try TranscriberAG. It needs compiling and the process may not be easy, but you can try with this non official version or post a message to the project mailing list to get help.
As already mentioned, a second option is Evidence Bucket, with less features but very easy to start (it's written in Java). It can be used with an external word processor too, because it has global keyboard shortcuts.
A third option could be to install Wine and, if needed, PlayOnLinux and use the free versions of Windows software like Inqscribe, Express Scribe, etc.
Automatic voice recognition software normally reduces the manual transcription needs. But Automatic voice recognition technology is not still matured to produce accurate transcription for non-American accents, or with people speaking quickly or multiple speakers audio files. If you have more than one voice it is almost impossible to get a good transcript. Add to that any background noise or a weak recording and you can pretty much forget it.
So, after automatic transcription, you have to massage this transcription into the final form. Some of the massages are
Correct incorrectly transcribed words/phrases. Correct punctuation/sentence breaks. Define paragraph breaks.
For automatic transcription, you can refer
ExpressScribe is pretty good and the free version works fine. It's for Windows but works well in Wine.
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There's a free Linux version but it showed some bugs on my computer, for example when moving through the timeline. A couple of times it crashed on startup.– AndrewAug 25, 2014 at 22:59
After getting frustrated with all the Linux community had to offer, in the way of transcription, I went on the path to copy Express Scribe. This is self-promotional, so if you like my software, I did it :). My program runs in the background. It's a simple window displaying "Hello World", but it operates like Express Scribe in that it listens for key combinations from you and controls your audio accordingly. You're free to use whatever document program you desire.
Controls:
F2 is play/pause. F4 is rewind 3 seconds.
I may advance the program further, if there is enough outcry but at this time, I have no need to do so.
You will need to install Python3 and Pyglet (minimum). If you want to deal with encrypted and compressed formats, you need to install Avbin.
The project can be found here: https://github.com/ki4jgt/Transkripshun
I tried many of the above suggestions and ended up with audacity
Use it like this to manually annotate a audio file with text:
- Open your audio file
- Hit (p) to pause track when you hear something you like to annotate with text
- Hit Ctrl+m to add annotation at point and enter annotation text
- Hit enter to finalize text annotation
- Hit (p) to continue listening to track
- Repeat 2-5 until your audio file is annotated
Make sure Sync-Lock-Tracks
is enabeled.
Jump between annotations with Alt+left / right arrow
Try Transcribear a free web based editor for manual audio transcription. It supports several formats including ogg, mp3. You can also set up hotkeys that can be very useful for fast typing, or controlling the player such as play the recording faster, slower, go backward to play the section again if you cannot understand the speaker when transcribing the recording.