[Lexicog] EasyRecorder for Toolbox (adding sound recordings to Toolbox files)

[Norbert Rennert]

Hello all,

This is a cross posting from another mailing list. My apologies if you 
received this earlier.
Toolbox is a good program to use for making wordlists and dictionaries. 
It also has the ability to play back sound recordings. These recordings 
can be anywhere on your computer, but it is better to put them into a 
subfolder where your wordlist or dictionary file is located.

A sample Toolbox record could look like this:
\lx headword
\ps noun
\ge english gloss here
\gn another language gloss here
\de english definition here
\dn another language definition here
\sf media\sample.wav (this would point to a sound file named 
'sample.wav' in a folder named 'media' which resides in the folder where 
the dictionary data file is stored)

In Toolbox, pressing F4 or shift+F4 plays back the sound file referenced 
in the \sf field.
Up until now it has been a fairly tedious process to record words, label 
them individually and enter that information into your database. 
Recently, a colleague of mine developed a program called EasyRecorder 
that will read Toolbox files and record speech for each record just by 
using the arrow keys of your keyboard. The program reads your data file 
and displays all the words in your dictionary like the browse view in 
Toolbox. You can do some customization of which fields to display. You 
must also specify where you want to store the sound files. Pressing the 
right arrow key starts the recording, pressing the left arrow key stops 
the recording. Pressing the down arrow moves the focus to the next word 
or record. When the left arrow keys gets pressed, recording stops and 
the program saves the sound file with the text in the \ge field as its 
name (another field can be specified as well). The sound file is saved 
in the specified folder with the name from the gloss field and the name 
and path is entered in the \sf (sound file) field of the database. This 
is about as quick and pain-free a method to add sound recordings to 
Toolbox files as could be possible. All you need is a microphone and a 
computer that can record sound. There are video tutorials on the site. 
Please note that this program is still in an alpha stage of development, 
but it does what it promises to do already. For peace of mind, make a 
back up of your data before using this program. I'm sure the developer 
would love to hear about bugs, suggestions for improvement, or praises 
for this awesome utility.

The link to EasyRecorder is:
https://mail.jaars.org/~sheldon_kehler@sil.org/EasyRecorder.html 
<https://mail.jaars.org/%7Esheldon_kehler@sil.org/EasyRecorder.html>
The developer's email is: sheldon_kehler at sil.org

Toolbox can be downloaded from:
http://www.sil.org/computing/toolbox/

Hoping that this program will add tons of audio data to textual Toolbox 
databases around the world.

Norbert Rennert

------------------------------------------------------------------------

NORBERT RENNERT
Information Technician
Canada Institute of Linguistics
7600 Glover Road, Langley, BC V2Y 1Y1
t: 604.513.2129 ext. 3956
f: 604.513.2128

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