MaxQDA Tutorial: Step-by-Step Guide to Transcribing Audio and Video Files (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to this MaxQDA tutorial on transcribing audio files. The first thing I need to do is import my audio and video files, which I can do by going to Import, and clicking on the respective button for an audio or video file. As you can see, there are also a number of import options for importing already existing transcripts, but in this tutorial we want to create a new one from scratch. After importing the files, they will be shown here in the document system. To transcribe this audio file, I'm going to right-click on it, and select Transcribe Audio File. MaxQDA will now automatically switch to transcription mode. The waveform of my audio file can be seen up here, while my future transcript is directly below. When transcribing video files, you'll see the video itself in this browser, but the transcription process works exactly the same way. To start transcribing, I'm going to click on the F4 button on my keyboard to play the audio file. Now I listen for a while, and press F4 again to stop the playback and write down what I've just heard. When I press F4 again, you can see that the playback position jumps back a few seconds. That's the rewind interval, allowing me to confirm that what I just typed is correct. You can adjust this setting here, and you can also customise the playback speed by opening the control panel right here. Now as you can hear, a second speaker has started speaking in the recording. Since I've activated both the timestamp on enter feature, as well as the automatic speaker change option, pressing return will now create a new paragraph with a timestamp, and will note the speaker change at the same time. You can also use freely definable keyboard shortcuts to quickly transcribe focus group discussions, or note other occurrences in the recording. Later on, I can click on those timestamps to immediately hear the original passage of

Speaker 2: my transcript, or use MaxQDA's sync mode to highlight the

Speaker 3: respective text passage while the audio file is playing.

Speaker 1: You can also insert as many timestamps as you want by pressing the F6 key. Just make sure that the timestamps in your video file have the same order as the ones

Speaker 2: in your transcript.

Speaker 1: The timestamp function will also let you sum up interview passages provisionally before transcribing them. If any coded part proves particularly useful, you can easily listen to it later on and transcribe it if necessary. In case you want to add to your transcription at a later point in time, simply right click the file and choose transcribe audio slash video to open MaxQDA's transcription mode again and continue where you left off. And that's basically everything you need to know about transcribing audio and video files with MaxQDA. As always, good luck with your project.