Transcription Buddy

Pros

GUI is clean and simple. Controls are laid out well. Offers plenty of tools for marking and editing during playback. Good design.

Cons

"Transcription Buddy can be used to play standard or compressed WAV, DSS or MP3 files." - This is not true. Transcription Buddy recognizes .wav, .mp3, .wma, and .vox. It is NOT a DSS player and therefore not very useful for professional transcription.

Summary

no DSS support. Use Olympus' free DSS Player Lite instead, or pay for software. Otherwise, a good and flexible player.

Pros

You get the same quality audio you download, which was amazing to hear after tearing my hair out trying to make Express Scribe usable, which I never could. Another Pro is that it's easy to figure out. You speed up/slow down and it only changes the quality a little. I used a footpedal and was able to modify it to my exact specifications. You can try it for free for a month, but it didn't take my credit card information so I don't know if that still applies or not. Guess I'll find out but it being so far and away superior to some others I've tried, it's worth the $40.00.

Cons

The same thing that's good about it is what's bad about it - as far as quality of video. It can't fix the sound quality at all, it gives only what you give it, so if you have a means of using audio editing software, try cleaning it up first, then you could try it. Other than that, no negatives that I can see. I supposedly have to pay after a 30-day trial but I'm so tired of the quality of free software that I'm willing to pay it.

Summary

I pretty much say it all above. I've tried quite a few other transcription software on CNET's list and this is the best I've tried so far and I've been a transcriptionist for 12 years.

Updated on Dec 29, 2011

I said "video" above and I meant "audio". That's what I get for posting at 3 something in the morning, lol.

Pros

versatile automatic pause feature, ability to slow down playback while maintaining pitch, keyboard shortcuts

Cons

no way to save place to come back to, playback is choppy and skips

Summary

I don't have a lot of experience with transcription, but I had a long interview I needed to transcribe and I decided I would give this software a try. I like the idea of the program, especially the ability to create pauses in the audio file every so often, to allow you to catch up in your transcription. However, this software is ultimately *unusable* for me because the playback likes to skip over whole words and phrases. It's impossible to get an accurate transcription when so many words are skipped over, so for now I'll stick to other software.

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Summary

This product has everything I've been looking for in transcription software, and then some.

Some features I find very useful:

--Supports many audio formats, including MP3.

You can:
--Easily define a section of a recording that you want to isolate, and jump back to the beginning of the section with a single click.

--Step backward and forward through a recording by intervals you define (as small as 1/10 second)--very useful for replays of garbled speech.

--Begin playback at very precise points in the recording (not possible with standard media players).

--Speed up playback to home in on a section to transcribe.

--Slow down playback to make it easier to keep up as you type.

And in the How Cool Is That department:
--Includes a feature that automatically pauses playback after a number of seconds you define--so that you can catch up in your typing--AND THEN AUTOMATICALLY RESUMES PLAYBACK.

The interface for the product is very easy to use, and for the most part intuitive.

The only gripe I have, and it's a minor one, is that it's easy to confuse the controls for defining a section with the controls for navigating through the section.

All in all, this is an outstanding product. I will have no qualms about paying the registration fee when my (fully functional) trial expires.