Have you considered the new Vmware player? Its free.
-----Original Message----- From: Tom Munro Glass [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 11 April 2006 8:51 a.m. To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OT: Transcription software for Linux > Actually, on the nch website, as well as the aforementioned 'scribe' > is also a program called 'switch'. It is for converting audio to > different formats. > > My wife does this sort of work too, and frankly it was easy to install > the Olympus software on a cheap laptop which was running Win 98. > Aside from that, I understand the problems clearly, and would be glad > to assist creating a solution. > > As I see it there are two problems. One of these is created by > Olympus, and the other is a general problem. > > Problem 1: Audio input. > Despite the fact there are cheap MP3 thumbdrives with FM and recording > facilities, a lot of places have dedicated dictation hardware. The > Olympus stuff is pretty good, so you will encounter it everywhere if > you are dealing with this sort of thing. As has been pointed out, the > sound file format 'dss' is proprietary. Olympus provide a utility for > converting DSS to WAV (Windows-only), and you can of course convert > WAV to MP3 trivially if you want. Alternatively the 'switch' software > from NCH is supposed to work under Wine, so that might be a good > solution to Problem 1. > > Problem 2: The Transcription Environment > Transcribers use a foot pedal to control the playback of audio whilst > they are typing. Typical features are pause/play, fastforward and > rewind. Having a foot pedal means that the hands can stay on the > keyboard. Pressing special keys to control the audio is tedious, and > reaching for the mouse is right out. I can think of many solutions to > this problem, assuming the audio is available in a playable format > (such as wav or mp3), and a controllable audio player is available > (such as xmms, or mpg123). What you need is to get the hardware to > control the software. The Olympus pedal connects via USB or serial. > I'd suggest it would be trivial to make a small script that polls the > serial port and sends commands to the audio player. No, I have not > done it with an Olympus pedal, but I have done it with other similar > hardware. > > If you didn't have a pedal, I can think of three ways to build one: > Get USB keyboard. Hack keyswitches and wire in footswitches. > Pressing footswitches generates keypresses. Get USB or serial mouse. > Hack buttons on mouse as above. Hack existing keyboard. Wire foot > switches into keys that are defined as 'hotkeys' for keyboard > operation of transcription software. Foot switch input is then > identical to pressing a hotkey. Oh, building a foot pedal is also > trivial- get one from Jaycar, get an old sewing machine from the > SuperShed, make something with MDF and microswitches (or even some > hinged blocks of wood that press on mouse buttons on the floor). > > Finally, you need some shell scripts or a bit of a GUI to tidy all the > background stuff away so that the user can use it without having to > know what's going on behind the scenes. > > So, whilst I can see a few solutions, this is why I installed it on > Windows. > > A Thanks for a very interesting post Andrew. It confirms what I suspected, and that is that although it is almost certainly possible to get something working in Linux, this is one of the few applications where you are better off sticking to Windows. I tried out the Windows version of the free Scribe software yesterday afternoon, and it works OK. However, it is not as useful as the DSS Player Pro software from Olympus. Firstly, Scribe doesn't integrate with Word/Excel and show the playback status/controls in a toolbar at the bottom of the application. Secondly, Scribe does doesn't sound as clear as DSS Player when you slow down the playback speed. I suspect that this would be an even bigger problem if you convert the DSS file to another format and use a standard media player. Most of the work seems to be for transcribing DSS audio into Word/Excel files, and I am now convinced that the best solution for this is the Olympus software. I raised the original question because if there was some good transcription software transcription software for Linux, my wife would prefer to specialise in creating OpenOffice documents using her favoured operating system. This probably isn't such a great idea after all. Tom
