Speaker 1: Today, I'm going to give you a quick overview of options for transcription software and why I think that F4 Transcript is by far the best. So F4 is what we've got open now, and normally you wouldn't even see this settings menu here. It's just transcription, toolbar buttons, and all the settings are right here. So there's not hidden menus, there's not settings to fiddle with. You can change formatting, you can change timestamp format, which I think almost no other program allows. It's currently set to minutes, seconds, and milliseconds, but I could also add hours back in there if I wanted to. So that's the settings in brief, and basically the way the program works is you open a media file and a transcript. So I'm going to do Control-O for open, and this lets me open media files or transcripts, so there's no silly extra anything. I'm just going to open this recording, and it gives me a little waveform preview down here which, depending on the file format and where it came from, can look a lot better than this. So now what we're going to do is I'm going to enter a timestamp for the zero point. I just push F8. I got too many programs open, and it should normally insert a timestamp. I just have probably got a couple other programs open that are watching that hotkey. There we go. So that other program was grabbing that hotkey. So I can enter timestamps with just one key, F8, and they're clickable, so it'll start from zero. Now suppose I don't want it to start from zero. Suppose I want it to start from 20 seconds in. I can do that. Notice it jumped right to 20 seconds. So these timestamps are completely editable. Another thing which is almost totally unique to this program, there's only one other program I know of that does that. So it just jumps to the spot on the audio, which is really handy. Now watch this little cursor here as I use F4. If I push F4 once, watch what happens. Did you catch it? It jumped back, and then it started. So it's at 33 right now, 133. Do you see how it jumped back two seconds? So that's great, because suppose this bit I just recorded is not a very clear bit. I can just push F4, and it'll automatically review that bit for me. Suppose I want to skip back a little further, but I don't want to touch the mouse. I can just spam F4 a bunch. Watch how it moves. So I can just work my way back until I'm where I want to be. Then I hit it again, pause, jump back and play, pause, jump back and play. At first, I didn't really get what the big deal was about this feature until I started using this software, and oh my goodness, it's so handy. Not only for reviewing difficult sections, but also because when I was just doing play-pause, I would miss things, and I didn't even realize I'd miss them, because it would just keep on going. So this is a really powerful tool, and that's probably why the software is called F4, because this keyboard shortcut's so good. So F4 for that, and then F8 to insert timestamps. And then the great thing about this is when you save these transcripts, so we'll just put some content in here, if I hit save, it's going to ask me where, yes, and then, oh it's upset, it's probably because that's open somewhere else, yeah, probably, don't save. This is not the first time I've recorded this video. All right, we're going to go back over here, we're going to do save again, this time we're going to do save as, and we're going to name it something else, I like Steve. All right, we're going to go look at that file in the file system. Great, glorious file system, look at this, look at Steve, Steve's already showing up as a Word document, because this program formats its transcripts as rich text format documents, which can be opened by Word, Open Office, Pages, so many different things. So we double click Steve, and it's not even taking us back to the transcript program, it's taking us directly into Word, and look, that's exactly what we typed. This is great, because if you want to print this out, if you want to format it, if you want to adjust things about it or take notes on it, having these in ready Word document format is just super handy. And then, afterwards, if I edit it in Word, if I add another time stamp, let's say, then I can just copy paste this whole thing right back into F4 transcript, and it'll work. Computer's got some listening feature, just paste it in there, and it works. All these time stamps work again, which is not a given, there's only one other program that does that. So that's what's so great about F4, you can open it directly in Word, which means you don't have to have F4 on the program that you're working with, on the computer you're working with the text with, you can copy and paste it back if you want the time stamps to come back to life, very easy. So now, let's run through the programs with deficiencies. No, why bother? We'll start with the least deficient, OTranscribe, it's a website, otranscribe.com. You can choose an audio file, which we will do. And so this thing covers a lot of the bases. It lets you insert time stamps, first of all, click the settings button, everything is here. These are all your keyboard shortcuts, this is very nice. And then, even right here, your playback controls, it reminds you, escape, F1 and F2. So if I'm typing along, with errors, and I hit escape, it starts playing, I can control that from here. And then if I'm typing in Chinese, there's one small problem though. Like right now I'm typing, and if I hit escape, it takes me out of that window. So if it's playing, and if I try to pause it right now, because the hotkey is escape, it's just going to leave that window. And even if I change that hotkey to something else, like F4, no reason in particular, it's not going to work. So F4 will play pause the thing still, I hope. I think I doubled up on a shortcut. Let's try that again, try that again, there we go, there we go, go away settings, alright, so now, So it's got a speech control, nice. So if I'm typing, and I try to pause it, nothing's happening while I'm in this screen. This is only a problem for you if you're using Chinese, but it's a problem. The other problem with this program is file management is a pain. So look, the only way to do it is import export. So I can export it as any of these three files, but the only one that will save my timestamps is the O transcribed format. Also I can't edit these, jumping right over them, and if I hit backspace, it just deletes the whole thing. And if I try to type in a timestamp, it does nothing. It's not magic, it doesn't realize it's there. So that timestamp right there does nothing. Only the one I use, by pushing a button, control J, inserts a new timestamp. So I can still insert new timestamps, but I have to use this software to do it. I can't edit them outside. And if I copy, if I leave this software, the timestamps all die. So if I export the file as a plain text file, and then if I import the file, oh, it won't even let me import the files. If it's a plain text file, it won't let you import it. It will let you reimport files that it has saved, but those files are hard to work with. So if we go to the computer and look at the files that O transcribed uses, it's this one. We're going to do it open with notepad. And look, this is hard to work with. You can still read it and you could still decipher it and figure out that, yeah, the text is there and it's HTML and whatever, but this is not, well, I would call convenient. So O transcribed gets lots of points for being free and being on the web and having timestamps that are clickable, but the file management, it gets no points. So goodbye to O transcribed. All right, next we're going to look at two other programs and their criticisms are very short. FTW transcriber, I hope it stands for for the win and express scribe. Both of these have the same problem essentially, and that is that they have not got any clickable timestamps. So we don't even have to use them to figure this out, though I have used them. So we can select this audio file. So it's loaded up here. It's got keyboard shortcuts right here for play, pause, rewind, whatever. But you'll notice it's copy time, not insert time, because the way these two programs are designed is to use with Word. So you are supposed to have Word open and you're supposed to have one of these two programs open and you use the playback functionality of hotkeys. So you play, pause. You can normally do this with a keyboard. And then the speech turned up. That's why it's doing that. And then and then while you're over here, suppose I want a timestamp, I can push F8 to copy it. And then over here, I can paste the timestamp into this document. Oh, come on, you hotkeys timestamp. It is supposed to be F8. I just have too many things open. Let's try this again. Do F8 again. And you see it. It pastes the timestamp right there. So it will paste timestamps into Word, which is nice if you're transcribing directly into Word, but you can't click it and it doesn't take you anywhere. And so for me, that's a deal breaker. And the other the other program I just closed down works the exact same way. And so the problem with both of these programs is you can't have, let's see here, this one timestamp is F9. So this one, if I open the file, just right here, I push F8 to get the timestamp. I actually haven't gotten timestamps to work with this one yet. That doesn't mean they won't. It just means I haven't succeeded yet. So anyways, this this works fundamentally the same way. So for me, that's a deal breaker. And I believe there's one more program left to look at, and that is Inkscribe. Inkscribe is almost as good as F4, but not quite. What's good about Inkscribe is like F4, simple interface, you're going to transcribe directly into the program. You've got clickable timestamps, editable timestamps. Unlike F4, the file format's garbage. So if we open a file, and it's got keyboard shortcuts and everything, so that's not a problem. I don't remember what they are though, too many of these programs. Edit shortcuts. So a little more complicated in the button department. So tab, control tab, and F8. So this one, I can do F8 to put timestamps in, and these are editable. So I can make this into 20 seconds, and click it, and watch, watch over here, it's going to jump. And it jumps to 20 seconds, and it jumps back to three. Maybe. Maybe not. I wonder if it, how, it does not like those timestamps anymore, I don't know why. Anyways, so I can take this timestamp and I can edit it again.

Speaker 2: What is the deal?

Speaker 1: And it jumps. It jumps to its spot. I can control with the keyboard, I can type things, but then when it comes to saving it, this is the problem. I'm going to go save as, and look, the only option is it's proprietary formats. So we'll just go ahead and save it as untitled, the greatest dishonor you can deal a computer file. And let's look at that in the file manager. So here it is, untitled. So already, the icon is Inkscribe, so it will open in Inkscribe for us, but like, that's not what we want all the time. Sometimes we want to open it in something that's not Inkscribe.

Speaker 2: So there, it just opened for us.

Speaker 1: So that's kind of nice. But if we want to see what the content of the file is like, like suppose we don't have Inkscribe on the computer we're using and we just need to print it out or copy it or something. So we open it with Notepad. So this still isn't bad, like, this is just a bunch of header information, and down here in the text zone, you can see that right there is what's up here. So you could edit it and stuff, in theory. So that's not terrible, but it's also terribly inconvenient. So while you can still copy something from Word into this program, you can't save it in a convenient file format. And so that's why F4 is the best. F4 has clickable editable timestamps, which Inkscribe also has. F4 has simple file formats, which none of the other programs have. And we can copy and paste in and out of it. We can save stuff to rich text format files. F4 is just a lot easier to use. Additionally, if you're on a Mac, F4 also exists for the Mac. Inkscribe also exists for the Mac, but again, it just doesn't stack up. And if you're on a Mac, OTranscribe is online, so you can use that too. But again, OTranscribe just doesn't stack up to F4. So ultimately, I would recommend using F4 to transcribe for the sake of language learning. That's all.