Our Transcription Tool: SoundScriber

If you are interested in transcribing your own sound files, you can download and use this software.

This software was developed by Eric Breck during his time at the University of Michigan. No technical support is available, but you can contact him with questions at ebreck@umich.edu.

SoundScriber is a program for Windows which aides in transcription of digitized sound files and is available for free under the GNU General Public License. Besides normal playback features such as those offered by the accessory Media Player (Play, FF, Rew, Pause), it also includes features specifically for transcription. These include keystrokes to control the program while working in another window (e.g. word processor, SGML editor, etc.), variable speed playback, and a feature called “walking.” Walking plays a small stretch of the file several times, then advances to a new piece, overlapping slightly with the previous one. With this feature, it is possible to transcribe continuously without having to manually pause or rewind the recording.

All these features are user-configurable, and a Windows Help file is provided. The program can open any file Media Player can, including wave audio files (.WAV), Video for Windows files (.AVI), MPEG Layer 3 (.MP3) and others. Certain features of the program, such as variable speed playback, are not available with all file types.

SoundScriber is released under the GNU General Public License (included as the file COPYING.txt in both the source and binary distributions below).

Download a copy of the SoundScriber program:

Note that on Windows NT/2000/XP, the help file will not be readable; please look at the RTF help file instead.

The source code for SoundScriber is freely available. If you make changes to the code, please send a copy to Eric Breck (ebreck@umich.edu) so they can be folded into the released version.

*SoundScriber is copyright 1998 the University of Michigan Regents.

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