I have seven audio casettes that contain the proceedings of a series of public meetings. Problem is, while the casettes are standard, the recording machinery used by the the public body is not. It used an extremely low recording speed. Accordingly, at normal playback speed, the voices are sped up to well beyond the comprehensible range.
I have access to standard dictaphones, which can slow down or speed up playback to some degree. Not enough for this, not by a long shot.
I need to get these transcribed. The recordings were made on an Advocate V transcriber, model no., VW1104141110, purchased about 8 years ago. These machines cost up to $3,700. I’m not willing to spend that much for a machine that I’ll never use again. I’ve talked to a couple court reporters that I know, but they use standard casette recorders as backups, not anything like this.
Anyone have any ideas? I’m willing to spend a few hundred dollars if necessary. (I have someone to do the work - it’s the machine I need.)
The solution is pretty simple, actually - dump the audio tapes to a digital format, and use an audio editing suite like ProTools to change the playback to a listenable speed.
As you’re only going to need this for transcription, you won’t even need to get it exact, just close enough to transcribe.
There should be plenty of places in Chicago to take care of this for you. Pretty much any audio post production facility should be able to handle it. Depending on your time frame, I could do it here as well (Madison). You can email me (ellestad AT charter DOT net) for more info if you like on that.
To expand on what picker said, this is very easy to do. I’ve captured several old cassettes this way (to burn onto a CD). All you need is a portable cassette player hooked up to the LINE IN jack on a PC’s sound port via a 1/8" stereo cable. Then capture it with an audio editing program such as Audacity (which will do speed up/down and its free!) You may have to do a few test recordings to get the right volume level on the cassette player.
One important thing. I’ll bet that, along with recording at slower speed, that original unit was a four track recorder. IOW instead of recording two stereo tracks it records four mono tracks. All this means is that, after capturing them, you’ll just have to separate the left & right channels and process them individually. This is also very easy to do via audio software.