A better iPad audio scrubber?

February 1, 2011 6:03 AM

I'm trying to find an ipad app that'll allow me to replay small, short sentences from a recorded screenplay.

I'm working on a storyboard and need to examine the inflection of different lines on a prerecorded, 10 minute dialogue track. I've tried iTunes and the native player in my dropbox player but find that the "sound bar" contoller is too short to get the control I need to re-find the beginnings of sentences I'm examining. I've used QuickTime on my laptop because I can stretch the play window out the full length of the screen and this make it a lot easier. I mostly need to repeatedly rewind 5 seconds or so (not more) without accidentally losing my place

Ideally, it would be great to see a section of the sound file waveform but an accurate, short rewind is the real thing I'm after and not a fine editing tool. Ive found the app store is a bit like the Canadian netflix browser -kind of opaque and it suggests a lot of junk.

posted by bonobothegreat to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Could you rerecord the clip in Soundpaper and transcribe in waypoints that you could easily jump back to? This is pretty kludgey, but it might work for your purposes.
posted by painquale at 11:21 AM on February 1, 2011

I use this applescript in iTunes to jump back ten seconds. It is easy to modify to any interval you want - change "10" to "5" for example.

tell application "iTunes"
if player state is playing then
--get the current track time:
set currTime to get player position
if currTime < 10 then
--go to start of the track:
set currSkip to 0
else
--otherwise, skip backwards
set currSkip to currTime - 10
end if

set player position to currSkip --skip to new position
end if

end tell
posted by conrad53 at 2:15 PM on February 1, 2011

I'd second painquale's recommendation of SoundPaper, now SoundNote. (Disclaimer: I'm the developer.) No audio import yet, but you could probably rerecord from your computer.
posted by davidme at 7:42 PM on February 7, 2011

Response by poster: Unfortunately it seems the iPad OS doesn't allow for an applescript solution.

I did download SoundNote and while I've only had a chance to try a few minutes of rerecording from the computer, it seems to be a great idea. I'll mark it as correct after I've tried it out for reals. Thanks!
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:07 PM on February 8, 2011

Response by poster: It turned out that the best suited app was Pocket WavePad. It allows you to scroll through and zoom in on the waveform in a timeline and select segments that you can play over and over without having to re-cue each time.

Thanks for the suggestions.
posted by bonobothegreat at 2:49 PM on June 10, 2011