Howdy. This may be a little out there, but I was wondering how people deal with transcription in (or our) of Scrivener. I’m writing up an interview piece, so I need to turn all this audio into text. My method is pretty simple: open the audio in Quicktime, press play and start typing in Scrivener. When I need to pause, a quick cmd-tab_spacebar. Lather, rinse and repeat.
I don’t know if there’s a better way to go about this. I suppose if I had a Scriv 3.0 feature request it would be an integrated and keyboard controllable player. That or the ability for the app just type out all my interviews, and then maybe write the whole piece for me.
Why are you command-tabbing and keeping the audio file externally? You can import the audio file into Scrivener, open it in the split pane so that the QuickTime view is open in one pane and the text in the other, and then you can control the QT file from the keyboard. (If you’d prefer not to import the file into the actual project, just open the split view in Scrivener and drag the QT file from the Finder onto the header bar of the pane into which you wish to open it - this will open the file in Scriv without importing it.) While typing in the text, cmd-return will pause or play the QT file - no need to take the focus away from the text you are typing. There are step forward and step back commands too (see the View > QuickTime menu for the shortcuts), but these are a bit fussy and will be more fluid in 2.0. So you can already do what you want in Scrivener if I understand correctly - and funnily enough, David is working on a tutorial video about how to do transcription in Scrivener at the moment - he just showed me the script the other day. (It covers exactly what I’ve just gone over, basically.)
This…is…BRILLIANT! I suppose I should have figured this out without the forums, but thanks for helping so quickly. I now see on the Scriv sales page it says you can Transcribe an interview. Holy crap this just gets better and better. Be well!
The transcription abilities of Scrivener are handy, but limited. There’s currently no way to step back /forward by a set amount, which is part and parcel of the transcription business. Until KB lets Scrivener II off the leash, which he’s hinted might have more sophisticated transcription tools, I use Stairways Software’s excellent Keyboard Maestro, which lets me assign keyboard shortcuts to Quicktime. Ctrl-Space toggles play/pause, and a combination of Ctrl+Opt+arrow keys lets me either jump back/forward three seconds or jump back/forward 15 seconds. Easy.
Another feature that some people might find useful that is missing in Scrivener is being able to insert time-stamps in the transcription so as to be able to go easily back from the transcription to the recording.
Although it’s not its primary function, TAMS (free) has a built-in transcription/coding module that includes this feature. TAMS keeps its files as separate RTFs so you can easily copy over the result into Scrivener if you don’t need to use TAMS’ arcane features.
I would like to also put this on a Wish List for the next iteration of Scrivener.
I’m hoping it might be like hyperTranscribe’s function (I’m only exploring it, I haven’t purchased it, because I actually think Scrivener’s transcribe function works VERY well with something like TextExpander.)
Command-Return has been working for me to play/pause the audio file within scrivener. All of my audio files are in the Research folder, so I link them from the transcribed text. As an aside, it would be nice to use the play/pause function commands that are built into the MAC keyboard.
For both transcription and editing the subsequent transcription, you may want to check out otter.ai, which can run in a browser and has excellent text/audio synchronization and timestamp features.
