Software for manual audio transcription (speech, interviews etc.)

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

I needed a cross-platform solution to use in my laptop (linux) and in my office pc (win xp) and decided to make my own:

It's called "Poor Man's Translator" and can be found here.

List of transcription programs

There is this comprehensive list of transcription software:

Name              Main category Second category Platform              License form
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.