Hi everyone. I expect to have a lot of material to transcribe and wondered if it worthwhile investing in a foot pedal to stop and start the recording - I used to use one years ago when I worked as a secretary and it was great but that was pre-digital. Has anyone got one that they could recommend that they use with digital recordings? Thanks.

Use 'transcription buddy' available for free download at www.download.com
It has a free 30 day trial (but if you uninstall it and download it again, it lets you).

It is great because under view>options it has 'variable pauses' so you can set it to for example,
play 15 secs
pause 2 secs
rewind 5secs

So once you have set it up for the speaker's speed (e.g. sometimes, I only get it so it plays 7 secs, pauses 3 and rewinds 5 or something), you never have to press pause, stop or play becasue it continually loops until it reaches the end of the track. It works with most files.

Hello. I've found Express Scribe by NCH really good for transcribing - it's free to download from: http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/

The programme suggests using F keys to stop, start, speed up and slow down the audio, and comes set up like this but you can change them to your own preferences or use a USB foot pedal. I've seen foot pedals going on Ebay for around £30 but in the end I got used to using a pattern of F keys I set up (I've never used a foot pedal before though).

I tend to feel a bit dubious about installing free software but I've had this running on both Mac and PC and it works really well on both, although I found that it stores a copy of each audio file you work on, so if you work on lots of files and don't delete them afterwards (or set up Express Scribe to delete the copies after a period of time) then it can take up quite a bit of hard drive space.

is there a pasta theme to this forum this month??