MacResearch

In 'Showcase' reviews, the reviewer is the developer. No claim of objectivity is made, but it’s a chance for the developer to show off his/her app. Here, Bartas Technologies presents Transcriva, a Mac OS X application that helps you transcribe lectures, classes or other audio or video files.

Transcriva is a manual transcription tool that targets users who cannot rely on automated transcription powered by voice recognition. As a result, the application is focused sharply on providing as much “power assist” as possible in your manual transcription tasks without getting in your way.

There are a number of competitors ranging in cost and complexity (from “free” to “ouch”). The trouble with voice recognition packages is that they are still too expensive, too inaccurate, and cannot distinguish between different voices. On the opposite end of the spectrum are “solutions” which amount to little more than a basic text editor and a media player.

Transcriva sits squarely in the middle, combining features found in top-of-the-line manual dictaphones and transcription software packages with the simplicity and pricing of the more basic packages. The diverse feature set makes it an ideal tool for many different types of transcription tasks, including dictation, medical transcription, meeting minutes, video captioning, and more.

The Concept

The Transcriva concept is simple: transcripts are associated with a media clip and contain “entries”. Entries are individual passages of text associated with a time stamp (when they occur within the media clip) and, optionally, the person who spoke the text. A media clip can be located on your Mac, on your local network, or on the Web.

Why not use a simple text editor? The answer to this is at the core of the entry-based approach. A transcript is more than text. It consists of time-coded annotations or blocks of speech (of potentially multiple speakers). A simple, “dumb” text file does not preserve this information, making subsequent navigation, searching, and intelligent playback impossible (or, at least, clunky). Transcriva solves this problem by providing a smarter editor with smarter organization.

The User Interface

The application’s user interface is the result of months of painstaking usability study, concentrating on keeping the most-used controls both visible and keyboard-driven while keeping everything else within easy reach.

Daring to be different is trying, but sometimes rewarding. In this spirit, version 2 breaks from the document-based tradition to provide a “library-based” organization. This is for two reasons. First, to be useful, the media associated with a transcript needs to be embedded within the document, potentially increasing the file size many times over. This approach also has some technical issues, the solutions to which each have their own serious drawbacks. Second, Transcriva needs to deal with all sorts of media types and sources, but must remain focused on managing its own data without having to become a media file manager as well. Transcriva’s library-based approach eschews documents for a central repository for your transcript data, regardless of where or how the transcribed media is stored.

Along these lines, a Transcriva transcript “points to” your media. Whether it’s on your Mac or on the web, you’re not forced to reorganize your media to suit the transcription application, nor are you forced to make unnecessary copies of the media - a frightening proposition for those who work with raw, high-definition digital video streams. What’s more, Transcriva is smart enough to know when a media clip is inaccessible and merely informs you without keeping you from your transcript. If the clip becomes available during your session (because, for example, you mount the volume on which it resides), Transcriva recognizes this and automatically loads the media if you’re currently viewing its associated transcript.

The media controls themselves provide the familiar play/pause, seek, and track scrubbing, but other useful features bolster them for transcriptionists. It’s these features that make Transcriva stand apart from its competitors.

The track scrubber, for example, can indicate where text entries occur within the media (“entry markers”). Searching by person name, for example, will filter out all entry markers except for those belonging to that person (the same filtering is applied to the transcript editor as well).

The media can be sped up or slowed down without bending the pitch. Speeding up is useful for skimming through your transcripts, and slowing down is especially useful for keeping up while you transcribe.

Another useful feature for when you can’t quite keep up is “Backtrack-on-Pause”. Enabling this option causes the media to seek backward by the specified number of seconds so that when playback is resumed, you’re better able to pick up where you left off.

One last feature is meant only for playback and navigation of completed transcripts. Turn on “Follow-Along” to have each entry in your transcript highlighted as it’s played back. Grab the play head and drag it to the desired position in the media clip and Follow-Along follows along. Click an entry in the transcript editor and the play head jumps to that entry’s position in the media.

If you’re transcribing a video (not just audio) and need to see what’s going on, you can turn on the video viewer and size and position it in whatever way suits you - it’s not built into a fixed position in the interface nor always displayed because it’s not always needed.

The transcript editor itself is a little more complicated than a simple text editor, but as mentioned, its job isn’t merely to let you type words, but to preserve the temporal (as well as attribution) information a transcript describes. When you begin playback, you create entries and add the text to them. How you choose to “break” entries is up to you, but the more granular your entries (a paragraph or a sentence), the easier you can navigate your entries later. For the purposes of closed-captioning, fine granularity is even more important, given that only a few short lines may appear on the screen at a time. If you intend to fill an entry with more than a paragraph or two, Transcriva won’t be a good fit for your workflow.

Entries consist of a time stamp and the associated text. If your transcript also has people associated with it, entries also display a color-coded “name tag”.

Click the “Transcript Properties” button and the transcript flips over to reveal the transcript’s associated media and people. The transcript properties panel allows you to disassociate and re-associate the transcript with a media clip, as well as to manage associated people (their names, color codes, and keyboard shortcuts).

Recording

Transcriva comes with one more surprise. You can record media right from the application. Toggle the media mode button to switch to record mode, select the desired audio and / or video device (you can use any Mac-compatible audio / video device connected to your computer), and click Record. A transcript is created and associated with the new media when recording begins and you can even transcribe or annotate while you’re recording.

Conclusion

Its well-rounded set of features and its flexibility make Transcriva a natural choice for many types of transcription tasks. Its US $29.99 price tag places it comfortably within reach of small businesses, students, and home users.

In addition, through 2009, MacResearch readers can receive a 15% discount when purchasing a new Transcriva license by using the coupon code TSMACRESEARCH09. This offer is limited to one per e-mail address, ends December 31, 2009, cannot be combined with other discounts, and cannot be retroactively applied to orders already processed.