# How can I slow down audio for the purpose of transcription?



## Michelle04 (Apr 1, 2010)

I am doing some freelance work at home on my laptop. I am being sent hour long audio files that I am transcribing into a Word document. I could complete these projects much more quickly if I were able to adjust the speed at which I hear the audio (as is possible with old skool transcription machines). Is there some way possible for me to accomplish this?

Thank you.

Michelle


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## stantley (May 22, 2005)

You could try Audacity, freeware audio editor/recorder.

I use a different audio editor that has a feature called resampling/time-stretching that will let you slow down the play rate. I think Audacity has something similar.


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## antimoth (Aug 8, 2009)

Yes. With Audacity you can slow down the speed of an audio file. It can get a bit unwieldy with a 90 minute file though.


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## ozziebeanie (Jun 24, 2009)

I did a course in this while working at the Police Station, as I did it there with their interview tapes, and I found at the course they used just windows media player to play them and its very hard to do. 

I found it easier to go with the tape player, headphones and pedals, which was used at the police station they did start putting interviews on disc but found they had problems storing them in the hotter parts of the country and lost interviews and cases because they lost the interviews because of disc damage through heat, and some of them from some very serious cases so they went back to the tape which was a lot more hardy. some of the older equipment still works better. 

I don't know if there is a specialised program for that, which allows you to connect a pedal so you can adjust speed while typing into your Word document, I would be very interested also to know if there is something more modern that works well for even longer files also.


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## m00k (Jul 20, 2005)

What are you trying to transcribe? Spoken word or music? If it's music, you'll need something that takes pitch into account, since slowing down audio lowers the pitch dramatically. If you're dealing with music, I'd recommend Transcribe, which lets you go REAL slow without any pitch degradation.

http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

Audacity can change the tempo without changing the pitch ...
Three tempo speeds in *This Example* .. two slower, the last is the original.


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