I found a source of transcription work for my wife a while back. They contacted her for one of those “rush” jobs that paid well, but there always seems to be a surprise. This time the surprise was that the electronic file to be transcribed was an Mp4 video!
Unfortunately the transcription software my wife and many others use doesn’t process video. And she needed the software to slow or speed the audio to do the transcription.
So what to do?
The key is to strip out the mp3 audio out of the mp4 video. Simple huh? Well it turned out not to be so bad. I went to SourceForge.net and downloaded Avidemux. I opened the mp4 file in the program and then saved the mp3 audio.
As with many of these transcription jobs built around public presentations, they took audience questions which were impossible to hear. At times the sound could be improved by boosting the “gain”. You can do that in Audacity an audio editing package, but if you want something just to boost an mp3’s sound as we did, we used MP3Gain.
Once we knew what we were doing(!), stripping mp3 audio out of mp4 video and boosting the sound levels was fast and easy.
It helped bring in a nice extra chunk of change before vacation!
No comments yet.