Bill,
About a year ago I did a couple of interviews and was not too keen on
learning new technology (transcription machine) but with Win amp and a
freeware program called sound pad did most of what you mentioned below.
1) Winamp is a neat little program (freeware) that comes with interesting
plus ins. The have wave in and out which allowed me to easily convert
audio from my tape recorder to either wav or mp3. I use this same plug in
regularly to convert mp3's to WAV to make CD's.
2) Sound pad is really pretty cool - I have actually never messed with a
transcription machine, so am not actually sure what they are capable of
doing. This program works with win amp and one would play the file in
increments doing the normal textual transcribing in what looks like a note
pad. In fact the transcription is just a text file but in sound pad after
all the transcribing the time increments (00.30) are all hyper linked. One
just highlights any blue time increment on the transcription in sound pad
and it plays from there.
And as you correctly point out a program such as winamp with its visuals is
great for the breaks you mentioned. With soundpad one could easily put in
some colored textual notation in the (text) transcription all in one
process. What is nice about this program soundpad which is very small is it
integrates the text and audio very nicely.
What was nice about this program on my end was I was able to give the
teacher I interviewed a cd of the interview - much more interesting that
countless pages of text.
Lastly, Napster is just a database with song title, author etc, but I
imagine one could use that same technology in which you could search the
transcription and could link to the corresponding audio segment. LikeTV is
using a similar type technology for movies and I believe its MIT is
currently working on technology for old news reels that will allow one to
search a century of film just like we do for text. All of this like the
database for pictures I began using is dependent on the classification
scheme one uses and it is text that is actually being searched.
Nate
PS: Winamp can be found at www.winamp.com and if any ones interested
playing with sound pad I could email it to ya.
Nate
At 03:52 PM 12/26/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>Have been spending some time working some audio taped interviews. It
>turns out that a nice program on the macintosh called "Peak" allows you to
>record and process audio digitally (in aiff format). At this moment I
>have 3 hours of interviews on a cartridge drive. (30 minutes takes
>approximately 78 Mb) After digital encoding, they are being segmented into
>files of approximately 3- 5 minutes each according to the topic questions
>of the discourse -- segmenting facilitates quick access to any particular
>portion of the interview. The visual display of sound makes it easy to
>locate breaks in the discourse for segmenting. "Peak" also allows digital
>signal processing, improving the quality of the audio.
>
>With a little more work the data will be re-encoded into mp3 format and
>then burned to a master cd (up to 11 hours will fit on a cd). Then
>standard audio cd's will be burned -- one for each interview. The file
>segments become audio tracks, facilitating the navigation across the
>interview, and making it available on any cd player, including the computer's.
>
>I have not tried the following yet -- but once the audio is encoded
>digitally, I envision that collaborators can share audio data using
>Napster. Napster has a search function that will find files by
>names/artists and selective naming should make it easy to locate
>data. data can then be shared through direct transfers.
>
>
>
>
>
>--
>Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
>Lesley University
>29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
>Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
>http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
>_______________________
>"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
> and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
>[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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