Welcome to the home of TransKribe

The problem

The task of transcribing speech recordings into editable, readable, printable text is a tedious and time-consuming one. Depending on the nature of the speech documents to transcribe and the required quality of the transcription, even skilled typists are quite often not able to keep up with the speed of audio-playback and will hence have to pause/rewind/resume audio-playback. The key problem here is, that you'd like to keep your hands on the keyboard and not have to move them to the controls of the playback-device every couple of seconds. Professional solutions for transcription then generally consist of a tape-player which can be controlled by a pedal. Hence you can use your feet to control playback while keeping your fingers on the keyboard

The disadvantages of this approach are: 1. The devices I have seen all operate on analogue media, while nowadays, you quite often have audio-recordings in digital format, such as a .wav-file. 2. Those devices are expensive.

Of course, if you're going to transcribe many hours of speech-recordings, those devices still pay off. In fact, TransKribe is rather targeted at people who just need to transcribe e.g. a limited number of interviews. In fact, TransKribe was written in oder to save the author some time on a very specific limited task.

The solution

The approach TransKribe takes is simple: Basically it's just a text-editor tied up with a wav-player. The central idea is, playback can be controlled via (configurable) shortcuts, which are easily accessible from the key-position of touch-typing. For instance, the default shortcut for pause/resume is Alt-K. This can be reached with left thumb and right middle-finger without removing your fingers from the base-position. Not a big deal at all, and certainly not as elegant as having a pedal to control audio-playback, but still it makes transcription a whole lot easier.

Secondary features are automatic insertion of time-marks on each new line and alternating line-coloring while editing. Once again, no big deal, but to the task at hand this proved quite useful.

TransKribe can be compiled for KDE 3.x

How to use TransKribe

TransKribe is not a polished shiny application at all. Rather, as mentioned, it was written in order to save the author time. The first thing to realize, then, is that it will give you little feedback on potential failures. In particular, you should always start TransKribe from the command-line, since those diagnostic messages that do get shown, get printed to stdout.

Next, start a new transcription by selecting File->New and chosing the audio-file to transcribe. File->Open will open a previously started transcription along with the audio-file.

Use Settings->Configure Keybindings to chose keys which are easily reachable on your keyboard.

What (not) to expect from TransKribe

There's loads of feature I can think of that would be nice to have for TransKribe. In fact the current implementation is just the bare minimum. Still, I won't implement any of those. I just don't have the time to. Keep in mind, that I wrote TransKribe in order to save time, not in order to create something beautiful.

So, if you would like to have some feature - don't bother mailing me about it. Implement it yourself if you can, try to find somebody else to do that, if you can't. But don't expect me to provide any support.

If on the other hand, you would like to enhance TransKribe yourself, I'd be very happy to grant you full developer-access to this project.

How to get it

I will upload my codebase shortly. Look for it on the project-page.


SourceForge Logo