Hellobee Boards

I write articles for my job's magazine, so I have to transcribe interviews or speeches from events about 4x a year. It's such a pain!

It's worse when it's transcription from a clunky old tape recorder because I have to stop typing to press "stop" or "rewind." At least if it's something viewable online I can use the space bar to stop and start while transcribing. We don't have one of those fancy recorders that has software to transcibe.

Although now I just get an intern or our office manager to do it for me! Score!

My husband uses transcription software in his work. He just uses a digital recorder and then uploads the file to the software, so the corrections are pretty minimal. If you have to do a lot of transcribing, maybe something like this will help?

http://www.dragontranscription.com/store/naturallyspeaking-pro.html

Omg, I had to do 10 45-min interviews over the summer for my graduate research and it was effing BRUTAL!!! Like you said, there's no good distraction bc you have to listen so carefully! I wish my advisor would've sprung for the digital transcriber but no dice, I did it all by hand...I'm now doing shorter follow-up interviews that are still hard to get through!

Yes, interviews, meetings, dictation when I worked in a legal secretarial pool. It can be very tough, but once you get the vocal patterns down for the speaker(s) it gets easier. Also using digital audio with a transcription program that has a foot pedal to control the playback also helps.