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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.

No technical support is available, but for more information, contact me (Eric Breck, ebreck AT umich.edu)

SoundScriber is copyright 1998 the University of Michigan Regents.

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

To download a copy of the SoundScriber program, click on one of these links: .tgz (gzipped tarball), (zipfile). Note in some browsers (including Netscape) you may need to right-click and choose "Save target as" or some equivalent action -- do this if your browser loads garbage characters when you click the link.

There are no installation directions besides extracting the files to the same folder. Note that on Windows NT/2000/XP, the help file will not be readable; please look at the RTF help file instead or see the help online here.

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

SoundScriber was originally developed for the MICASE project