oTranscribe. Transcribe an audio file

Last updated on 21 January 2014

OTranscribe is an online tool that facilitates transcription of an audio file.

If there is one task that can be painful and time-consuming, it is the task of having to transcribe an audio file. Moving from one application to another, going back, finding the exact place where we stopped … Researcher, student, teacher, journalist, everyone has been confronted at least once with this exercise which can quickly become very painful.

oTranscribe is going to make it a hell of a lot easier. Entirely written in html5, and offered in Open source, this webapp brings together an audio player and a word processor on the same page. The use is simple and intuitive, general ergonomics is a model of its kind. With some experience, oTranscribe allows rrecord any audio recording quickly and even very quickly.

You must first download the sound file you want to decrypt. The main audio formats are supported of which the main ones: .mp3. wav or .ogg.

The audio player commands are displayed at the top of the blank page you are going to write to. Quickly stored keyboard shortcuts will allow you to play the sound, pause it, move it forward quickly or make a quick return. Conveniently, when you restart the playback of an audio file after a pause, it resumes one or two seconds earlier upstream of where you stopped it to allow you to find the meaning of the sentence.

Practice also and indispensable, a slider allows you to adjust the speed of the sound scrolling. That's great.

 

On the word processing side, there too you will be entitled to an impeccable interface. The formatting commands are displayed this time on the right side of the screen. Keyboard shortcuts are always displayed for on-the-fly layout. Other interesting commands in this menu are a time marker that allows a time marker linked to sound to be inserted into the text. You will also know how many words your text contains.

A minimal but effective word processor that avoids distraction. Your transcript completed, you can export it in .txt format. You can also save it directly to your Google Drive.

oTranscribe is useful, convenient, simple to use and it is open source and free. Frankly hard to do better. You can't thank the author enough. Let us mention it here, he deserves it, it is Elliot Bentley, an English journalist.

Link: oTranscribe