MD recorder

[Ben Zimmer]

At 07:54 AM 8/4/00 -0400, Karen Nakamura wrote:
>
>The big minus is the lack of a professional MD transcribing machine (foot
>switches, variable speed, etc.). As MD catches on, I think we'll start to
>see them.

What I've done as a way around this is to patch the MD into my computer and
save sections for transcribing as WAV files using WaveLab software.
Ideally one would want to also have a CD burner to save big WAV files
directly onto CD-ROM.  Maintaining "CD-quality" sound (stereo, 16 bit, 44
kHz) takes up lots of space, but I find if you save a recording with low
resolution it's still sufficient for transcribing clearly recorded
interviews and takes up much less space (a 1-hour recording saved as mono,
8 bit, 11 kHz takes up about 38M).

For transcribing I use shareware developed by the UC Santa Barbara
linguistics dept. called VoiceWalker.  You can find it on their website at:
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/resources/computing/download/download.htm
This is quite handy, although it doesn't have variable speed control.  If I
need to slow something down I use the Time Stretch option in WaveLab.

Good luck,
Ben



______________________________
Benjamin G. Zimmer
Jl. Jongjolong No. 51
Bandung 40262 Indonesia
Tel/Fax: (62-22) 731-2551
Cell/Msg: (62-812) 232-2080
US Fax: 603-676-1316 (via eFax)
bgzimmer at midway.uchicago.edu