I'm doing research for a project that involves taking about 60 hours
of digital audio files and picking out the best segments to make a
one-hour CD. The tapes are lectures with a teacher doing about 70% of
the talking; the rest of it are interchanges between her and students.
We wouldn't necessarily be using the final excerpts in chronological
order: for instance, she might talk about one topic in several places
and we would combine those, or compare them to find the most effective
sections, and what she says last might come first.
So the question is: how to do this the most efficiently? My thought
was to get voice recognition software and use that to at least
partially transcribe the tapes. Then we could read through them
quickly (as opposed to listening to all 60 hours) and select the
particular sections that look promising, then listen carefully to
them. For this we would need voice recognition software that
correlates words with specific points on the tape. It would probably
also mean pulling the digital cuts into a separate file for comparison
purposes -- so would that involve using audio editing software? Then
once we had chosen the best selections, we could do a final
arrangement and have a CD.
So what I need to know is:
1) What is the best way to proceed on this project?
2) What voice recognition software would work with digital files that
are pre-existing? (She can do the short tape to "train" the software
to her voice)
3) What voice recognition software also indicates exactly what points
on a digitial file the words are?
4) What audio editing software works smoothly and simply under those conditions?
I'd appreciate one without too much of a learning curve. I've never
done audio editing before, and wouldn't be doing the final polishing
-- just selecting segments.
5) Are all audio editing software programs compatible? In other words,
if I edit a .dss file with one software, can someone else re-edit that
tape with another software?
Thank you! |
