Using Free Software To Help When Typing Up Notes From Digitally Recorded Interviews, Meetings or Focus Groups

You have just spent an hour or so digitally recording an interview, team meeting or focus group now you have to head back to your desk and type up notes from that meeting. How do you do it?

Most people would play back the audio in Windows Media Player of QuickTime and flick from their audio player back and forth to their word processor typing the small snippets of information they hear before they have to head back to stop and rewind the audio for a couple of sentences. Anyone who has done this will know it is very painful and takes forever.

There is a solution and it's free. It is Express Scribe from Australian company NCH Swift Sound. Using Express Scribe the audio playback is totally controlled from within your word processing application like Word. Simply by using any pre-configured keys on the keyboard (or by using a USB foot control) you can easily stop/rewind/play the audio without leaving the document you are writing, saving alot of time.

Just because of free does not mean it is feature poor. Far from it, Express Scribe has an impressive array of features like:

• Auto file loading from email or network drives
  
• Audio file noise suppressing/noice boost for poorly recorded audio
  
• Variable audio playback speed
  

Express Scribe is available for both the Windows and Intel Mac platforms. Give it a try and save yourself a few painful hours at the keyboard.