Transcribe! 7.31 review
DownloadThe Transcribe! application is an assistant for people who sometimes want to work out a piece of music from a recording, in order to write it out, or play it themselves, or both.
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The Transcribe! application is an assistant for people who sometimes want to work out a piece of music from a recording, in order to write it out, or play it themselves, or both.
The usual technique for doing this is to copy the music to cassette and then listen repeatedly to each bit, using your ear and your brain to work out what is happening. Unless you have perfect pitch then you also need a piano or a guitar handy to check out which note is which. However, if you copy the recording to your computer's hard disk as a sound file then you can use Transcribe! instead of the cassette machine and the piano. Transcribe! offers many features aimed at making the transcription job smoother and easier, including the ability to slow the music down without changing its pitch, and to analyse chords and show you what notes are present. It is important to understand that Transcribe! does not attempt to do the whole job, processing an audio file and ouputting musical notation - this would be nice, but is a currently unsolved research problem. The spectrum analysis feature is very useful for working out those hard-to-hear chords, but you must still use your ear and brain to decide which of the peaks in the spectrum are notes being played, which are merely harmonics, and which are just the result of noise and broad-spectrum instruments such as drums. If you have never worked out even a simple piece of music by ear then Transcribe! will probably not help you (see How? to? Transcribe), but if you do sometimes work out recorded music by ear then Transcribe! can make the job a lot quicker and easier.
Transcribe! takes no interest in MIDI files - these already contain explicit information about what notes are to be played and when, and there are plenty of programs available which can display this information. Transcribe! deals with audio sample data files.
Transcribe! is not an editor. It reads, plays and records audio files but does not modify them.
Here are some key features of "Transcribe":
Depending on version, Transcribe! reads audio from many different types of audio file and audio CD. It also has a "Record" facility for recording from analog sources such as cassette or vinyl. It displays the audio waveform and allows you to scroll around, place markers for sections, measures and beats, and easily play or loop from any point.
Loops and positions can be stored and recalled. There are many keyboard shortcuts and you can configure these as you like (in version 7). You can configure Transcribe! to respond to MIDI (not on Linux) so as to keep your hands free : start and stop playback with your feet!
There is extensive and readable help accessible from within the program.
The "spectrum" feature displays the strength of the various pitches in any chord or note you select, in the form of a graph - a wavy line over a piano keyboard graphic. The height of the various peaks in the graph indicate the strength of the note above which the peak appears. This is not a magic bullet for analysing chords but it can be a very useful source of information.
Transcribe! offers various audio processing effects (Slowdown, Pitch Change, EQ filtering etc) intended to help with transcribing. These effects all run in "real time" unless your machine is old & slow. This means there is no pre-processing or other waiting, the processing is performed on-the-fly while playing and you can instantly hear the effect of changes to EQ etc. For instance if you press the half-speed button while playing then playback simply continues, at half speed.
Mono/Karaoke
This effect allows you to mix the two channels of a stereo recording together in various ways including phase-reverse, commonly known as "karaoke" as it sometimes has the effect of removing the vocal (if the vocal is panned dead-centre).
EQ
A powerful EQ filter.
Tuning
Adjustment to playback pitch, in cents (hundredths of a semitone) for fine tuning and also larger shifts of up to two octaves, which can for instance be useful in hearing low, murky bass parts by raising them by an octave or two.
Transposition
Special handling for those of you who play a transposing instrument such as trumpet or saxophone.
Speed
Speed variable from one twentieth to double speed.
Limitations:
30 day trial.
What's New:
Main features are support for transcriber's footpedals (non-MIDI),
unicode support on Mac
new Help system for Mac & Linux
many other improvements.
Transcribe! 7.31 keywords