What is a good piece of desktop software for annotating voice memos?
November 13, 2014 3:31 PM   Subscribe

iTunes and iOS are fine for occasional use, but what is a good tool for organizing extracting and useful information; e.g. manual transcription, annotation, and tagging?

I take voice memos with my iPhone to capture important conversations, presentations, and other events, but at the moment my workflow is record-only: I rarely re-listen to recordings, which means that I'm missing out on much of the value of making them at all. I suspect this is mostly due to the cumbersome interface of the iOS app and iTunes: A music jukebox is not the best tool for organizing, annotating, and transcribing voice memos; in fact it's not a tool for that at all.

The main problem is that it's difficult to see at a glance what each recording contains, beyond simple metadata like title and time. What I want is a way to add time-stamped annotations identifying and summarizing the important parts of each recording.

What would be a good tool or tools to review and annotate voice recordings? Also, what might be a good way to organize them into different categories using folders, collections, or tags?

As usual, software that isn't future-proof is basically useless in the long run, so anything using an opaque closed database or format will be frowned upon, and anything that is cross-platform FOSS will be viewed favourably.
posted by Verg to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Total self-link, and the time precision is overkill, but this will definitely do the trick. No tagging or organization though.
posted by supercres at 8:26 PM on November 13, 2014


Response by poster: It's a start!
posted by Verg at 9:34 AM on November 16, 2014


Look in to PearNote, I think it'll do what you want.
posted by reddot at 2:29 PM on November 20, 2014


Response by poster: Yes, that would get the job done functionally, and the web export capability allows for some degree of cross-platform compatibility. Thanks for the suggestion!
posted by Verg at 5:43 AM on November 22, 2014


Best answer: Sonocent Audio Notetaker also looks pretty powerful. Windows and Mac. Not at all sure about the file format it uses.
posted by Verg at 5:07 AM on January 2, 2015


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