Craig FALCONER wrote:
Have you considered the new Vmware player? Its free.
Or run the app under win/qemu using samba to access the ports and with
OO also running - if this setup is possible
Barry
-----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
