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Every now and then I have the dubious pleasure of transcribing taped interviews. Push play on tape recorder, listen and type. What was that he said? Push rewind. Shit, I went to far. Push fast forward.
I've been wanting to take some of the drudgery out of this work by having the tape recorder integrated with my editor for a good many years.
Just the other day I stumbled on Transcriber, a piece of Tcl/Tk? code, that promises to make transcriptions easier. I tinkered with it for a couple of hours. First it looked kind of nice and then it crashed on me. Twice. Plus it wasn't Emacs anyway. And I knew there had to be an Emacs mode for doing this. It was just a matter of finding it and tweaking it.
I had a glance at Emms, Emacs mp3player and MpthreePlayer. But they all seemed geared towards people who want to browse their Mötorhead collection in Emacs. Not my thing.
Then I gave up and spent two or three hours writing my own. Then I gave up again and just browsed the web at random for an hour or so. That was when I found it. (See, browsing the web randomly actually pays off!) Kilian A. Foths transcript.el.
It lets you control mplayer, mpg123 and some other players from Emacs. I did some minor alterations to make it work better with mplayer and GNU Emacs (Kilian seems to be running XEmacs) and not to mess up my key bindings. Here's my version.
And here are my .emacs settings.
(require 'transcript) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(insert)] 'tm-play) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(home)] 'tm-up2) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(end)] 'tm-down2) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(control escape)] 'tm-quit) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(control prior)] 'tm-prior) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(control next)] 'tm-next) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(control up)] 'tm-up) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(control down)] 'tm-down) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(control left)] 'tm-left) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(control right)] 'tm-right) (define-key transcript-mode-map '[(control insert)] 'tm-insert-timestamp)
You set some local variables in your text file. Reload the files and push insert or eval tm-play to start playing. Emacs will start mplayer in the background and display the current position in the file on the modeline. Play around with the keys to find out which ones forward/backward you 5 seconds, 60 seconds and 600 seconds respectively.
<!-- Local Variables: mode: transcript tm-sound-file: "</full/path/to/your/aufdio/file.mp3>" tm-playback-position: tm-point: End: -->
Transcript needs some improvements.