Essential Tips for High-Quality Audio Recordings for Transcription (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hello, I'm going to go over a few tips on how to make a good audio recording for when you send it off to be transcribed. One of the first things that you should consider if you're making an audio recording is that you soundproof your room. So you don't want to pick a room where there's a lot of colleagues walking backwards and forwards or there's a lot going on outside. So you want to make sure that you put your microphone in sort of a quiet area, still close to where people are going to be talking, but say not close to where you get the teas and coffees or where you've got a creaky table because it will pick that up quite a lot. Also if you can, try and pick a room that hasn't got a lot of traffic or things going on outside. My next tip is to invest in a good quality microphone. If you're conducting a large interview or focus group, then it is preferable if you can give everyone their own microphone, either a desktop microphone each or a lapel microphone. If you don't want to do that, you can buy one microphone and place it in the centre, but you'd want it to be an omnidirectional microphone so that it picks up all the sound in the room. If you're going to use that though, you want to make sure that there's not a lot of papers being shuffled about or things going on in the background because obviously the microphone will pick that up and make it hard for the transcriptionist to hear what's being said. The only time I would say you should ever use your phone to make a recording is if you're really pushed for time and you're just making a dictation because otherwise they're not very good at picking up the sound and you'll get a lot of unclears in your transcript. My last tip is to explain to everyone before the interview starts not to talk over each other and to keep on the subject. Sometimes during interviews and particularly during focus groups you can get individuals who want to talk about one particular thing and the best thing to do is to keep control of the group and steer them towards talking about things that are on the subject. It's also a good idea to plan your questions so that you can keep that focus even more. So those are my tips on how to make a good audio recording. If you've got any comments or questions please leave them below or otherwise visit our website which is www.transcriptioncity.co.uk. Thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe.