Summary of Solutions for Recording Snafu

[Pam Norton]

Solutions for Recording Snafu

Thanks for all who responded with helpful suggestions to my audiotape recording at the wrong speed – summary below. 

I was able to get the original tape recorder and set it to double speed and the sound came out at normal speed. However since it is cumbersome for transcribing, I will follow suggestion #6 for converting the tapes to digital and slow them down on the computer with audio editing software as in 6 below. 

Also discovered “Hypertranscribe” software downloadable from the internet (you can demo but have to buy to effectively use it) that allows me to import my video narratives into it and then transcribe alongside the video – very neat. Thanks everyone for introducing me to the digital age!!!

Pam Norton, ABD
Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education
UC Berkeley & SFSU


1) digitize the audio, and play it at a reduced speed

2) digitalize the tapes and import the data into a sound treatment file (our language learning lab on campus had one, I think it was a version of imovie or something similar-- you should ask the tech people on your campus what is available to you, and the language learning center is also a good starting place since they usually have programs to slow speech files down).
I ultimately chose not to go this route because it distorted the sound some and was more for work others as well as me (since I would have had to have someone digitalize for me etc.) 

3)  just transcribe with the recorder I had originally used to record. The quality for transcription was lower and the process more tedious than with a pedal or larger surround sound set-up, but the recorder recognized that the tape was on high speed and automatically slowed it down when I played it back for transcription.

4) If you open them in a sound program like cool edit, you can just tell the program they were really recorded at a different rate than it thinks they are and it will adjust the speed.  So its certainly doable – but the specifics of how you do it depends on what equipment and programs you have available to you.  Its probably easier to do it in a sound editing program of some sort.

5) There are variable speed cassette players.  Used with transcribers.

6) Yes, there’s an easy solution! First you need to get the sound files into a computer. If these were recorded on a digital recorder, it should just plug in via USB. If you used an analogue recorder, you just need a lead connecting the headphone out socket to the input socket of your sound card (probably a mini-jack plug on both ends).
 
Once you’ve got them in the computer, you can use software such as Sony Sound Forge to halve the duration & pitch – This is expensive, but there are also lots of public domain/shareware audio editors that will do the same job- just look for stuff called “audio editing software, pitch shift, duration shift, time stretch” on google.
 
7) you can have analogue put onto digital form and then deal with it (you can download from cassette onto computer if you have a mixer plugged in to the computer).




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