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

Is there any software that supports you to manually transcribe content from audio files (like ogg, mp3) to text?

Solution 1:

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

Solution 2:

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.