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I would prefer it if Audio Notetaker automatically set hotlinks so that I could tell exactly what audio was playing when I made a note, but sections are nevertheless useful.įor example, if you have an interview, a logical approach would be to make each question and each answer a section. You can create these breaks with keyboard shortcuts. How do you synchronise your notes or transcription with the audio to which it relates? Audio Notetaker does not do this automatically, but does allow you to insert section breaks which split the document into vertical sections. There is also an image pane, which can include images, PDFs or PowerPoint presentations. The Reference and Text panes are functionally identical, but let you keep two different types of notes with one recording. When you are typing in one of these panes, you can use keyboard shortcuts to control the audio, such as Ctrl+Space for play/pause, Ctrl+\ to skip back, and Ctrl+/ to skip forward. If you are transcribing, you can type into either to two text panes, one of which is called Reference and the other just Text. You navigate the recording by clicking on the bars, and annotate it by assigning colours to bars according to your own scheme, such as blue for a potential quote, or brown for “boring, skip this”. The length of each bar varies according to the content, but typically seems to be around 3-15 seconds. This is not altogether reliable since speakers may pause mid-phrase, but you can split or merge bars if needed.
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Each bar represents a phrase, determined by Audio Notetaker according to pauses in the speech.
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#AUDIO NOTETAKER SOFTWARE SERIES#
When you import a recording, it shows as a series of bars in a large panel, rather than the single horizontal scrolling view that most audio players present. The primary feature is the the way recordings are visualised and navigated. The audio is copied into the document, rather than being added as a reference, so these documents tend to be large, a little larger than the original. If you have an existing audio recording, you can import it into a new Audio Notetaker documnent and start to work with it.
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Audio Notetaker lets you create documents which include audio, text and images.
#AUDIO NOTETAKER SOFTWARE MAC#
Sonocent Audio Notetaker is an application for Windows or Mac dedicated to making sense of speech recordings. There are utilities around to overcome this – my solution was to write my own Word macro which can pause and rewind a recording with keyboard shortcuts – but it is another issue to fix. You have Word open, you have your recording open in Foobar, but to control Foobar you have to switch focus away from Word, which means you cannot type until you focus back. There is also an annoying problem with application focus if you want to transcribe a recording. You can get better at this, and I have formed a habit of noting times when I hear something which I am likely to refer to later, but standard audio players (such as Foobar 2000 or iTunes) are designed for music and not great for this kind of work. Of course you can transcribe everything, or get it transcribed, but that is not quick it will likely take longer than the original event if you want to transcribe it all, and even selective transcription is a slow process. You end up with an MP3 which has all the info within it, but with no quick way to find a half-remembered statement. Why bother taking written notes, when you can simply record the audio of a meeting or interview and listen to it later? I do this a lot, but it is problematic.
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