On 25/02/2016 10:08, Paul Wise wrote: > On Thu, 2016-02-25 at 09:42 +0100, Philip Rinn wrote: > >> I think you misunderstood the purpose of gTrcanscribe. It's not about >> subtitles, >> it's about transforming spoken words (like recorded interviews) into text >> files >> by transcription. I only see one other program for this purpose in Debian, >> transcriber[1], which I find much less intuitive to use. > > Sounds like pretty much the same process as subtitling to me, but OK. >
I agree with Philip Rinn that we have three different tasks here. Apparently gtranscribe targets users that just want the transcription of an audio file, with the purpouse to obtain a written form of the audio, to be used, for example, in a blog. In Debian we have several subtitling software (e.g. gnome-subtitles) that serves a similar purpose. But subtitles will not help providing a written form of the audio and will force users to deal with time synchronization. It is possible to export the subtitles in a text file and edit afterwards, but I agree that is not very convenient for the simple transcription task. As far as I know, in Debian we only have one software that is dealing with audio annotation, that is transcriber. The annotation task is actually a superset of the subtitling task, as the main difference is that there are much more machine readable information that should be produced. I also agree that transcriber is suboptimal for the simple transcription task, as it will try to push the user to deal with time synchronization, channels, speakers, noises, ... On the other end, the output of transcriber will be much more convenient to edit for the simple transcription task, because the additional available information can be exploited for this purpose. In the past I have tried to perform all of these tasks. I have never been comfortable with any of the subtitles software in Debian. Even for subtitling, so, I now use transcriber for everything. On the other end, when users just want a simple transcriptions (think about students transcribing teacher lessons, so that they can study on it), both subtitling software and transcriber fail shortly and the right tool is probably a player with an embedded text editor, with convenient shortcuts for the playback (there should be one-key shortcuts for most of the functions). Bests, Giulio