Friday, February 5, 2010

Transcribing Your Life

Books on tape, CD or mp3 are popular because they enable you to multitask. You sit an knit or drive while you are hearing your greatest author speak about diet plans to lose weight or make money with real estate. With more audio content becoming available on the Internet, you can hear talk radio shows on pod-casts, called because of the iPods that propelled them into easy access and popularity.

Reaching a larger audience than ever before, you can have an online one person show talking about whatever subjects you are interested in. Audio reaches even those unable to see well, like the partially blind or, like my grandmother, those elderly who have suffered sight loss through complications from diabetes or age. On the reverse side of this coin, if you already have a successful audio product, you might be interested in turning it into a book or individual show transcriptions. Transcribing a conversation can be done using online transcription services. Transcribing takes an audio file and turns it into written words.

In school, we were required to learn a little bit about transcribing. Our school was built in the stone age, so we used tapes that were controlled with a foot panel that stopped the tapes and then rewound them a little bit so you could be certain to not miss any words or have breaks in the flow of speech. I hated that class. I think I got a C. All sorts of antiquated equipment that barely made sense and we got to learn all the fun short cuts for operating systems no longer in common use.

This was my school's idea of teaching financial literacy, teaching us how to write checks and then giving us points off for forgetting to enter them into a check register, what fonts look best on software and how to make a household budget that did not include such important items as car payments, a mortgage or food. One of the best things I learned in that class was I am really good at cooking and I like transcribing my own thoughts without using a transcription device.

I also learned that online banking is a good deal. More than a decade after that class, it records what checks or automatic payments have been deducted from my account, has software to track my spending and registers my checks. I really think things have changed since I was in school, for the better.

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