Hi,
I'm a sight-impaired computer enthusiast and hobby musician from Finland. As I do transcription work here in the Uni, as well, Express Scribe has proven to be a great program all in all. I can keep the focus in my text editor and have my screen reader read that, yet controlling the playback is quite possible, too.
I've run into one problem with Express Scribe, the latest version, however. This work machine is in a domain and I'm using a power user profile to run it in an English XP Pro machine with latest fixes applied. THings work fine in general but I am unable to add or customize any hotkeys in the preferences, although the existing keys do work. A custom key layout would make recalling things easier and I could also opt not to use any f-keys used by my screen reader or text editor. I believe my screen reader also uses system wide Win32 keyboared hooks as does Express Scribe, I suppose, so I wonder if the two conflict. I'm having no issues on my home machine, though, in which I'm the admin -> security be damned, <smile>.
When I try to pick a command in the list box I notice that the whole box is empty. Can anyone replicate this? Do I really must run with admin rights or might this be a permission issue?
My second question concerns navigating in an audio file. PErsonally I don't like pitch shifting while rewinding much at all. I don't use time stretching either in transcribing although I do use very high speeds when listening to audio books or my speech synth.
To make it easier to jump back and forth in the file, I would llike the ability to skip the specified number of milliseconds in the file without playing any intermediate audio at all. To sound smooth, though, snapping to a zero crossing would be nice. Is this doable by adjusting the rewind settings? I still don't fully grasp them for some reason. Another nice option might be what's called scrubbing in progs like Sound Forge or Sonar. Basically fast playback with no acceleration or deceleration. Again, can this be emulated in Express Scribe? Yet another mode I've seen in another transcription package would be playing m ms of audio and rewinding back n ms where m > n. I think the feature might be called cpontinuous transcription or something along those lines.
Any help greatly appreciated.
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With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä
spam://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila