Music: transcribing & practicing
I have used Transcribe! for many years in my work transcribing for a Norwegian music publisher. Transcribe! is primarily aimed at musicians and has many features like slowdown, tuning, looping, etc.
Putting barlines, beats, and section markers for verse, chorus, solo, etc. right on the waveform has been the most useful function for me. This makes it easy to navigate around a song and pinpoint exactly what I want to listen to in a given moment while transcribing. It also gives me a better overview of the form of the whole song.
For practicing your instrument with Transcribe! you have functions like 'speed up' where you can have a loop starting out at a slow speed and gradually increase the speed as the loop repeats.
There is also an equalizer and karaoke mode that let you supress or boost certain frequencies so that Transcribe! can function as a music-minus-one for practice when you take out e.g. the bass of a recording.
Speech-to text & language practice
Later I realized that the program also is great for transcribing speech since there is an expandable field for text blocks with plenty of space for writing above the waveform.
So loading videos of spoken Spanish into Transcribe! I found it perfect for language practice, both writing and listening to improve my Spanish pronunciation.
Transcribing this way is a good way of measuring your progress if you work with material that is a little above your level: Write the words you can hear and leave dots where you can't. Coming back to it weeks or months later when your general comprehension has increased you may see that what was once difficult to hear has become easier to understand. Hopefully you can now exchange the dots with the words that have become clear to you. That's very satisfying and a proof of progress!
Just as with transcribing music, the ability to click right on the waveform to place the play-from-mark to listen to a specific word, sentence, or paragraph over and over just hitting the spacebar repeatedly, couldn't be easier. Also slow down to e.g. 70% speed when necessary is useful.
Study dance & movements in general
To be able to slow down a video when I want to learn new movements in Argentine tango has been a great help in my effort to improve my skills in that area. Also bookmarking on the navigation bar, or the list window is very convenient in order to keep track of specific spots that interest me.
With the text blocks I put annotations, and sometimes lay down measure and beat markers of the music to make it even easier to decipher what the dancers are doing.
The dancers in the video:
Michelle & Joachim website:
http://www.michelleyjoachim.com
https://www.youtube.com/youndmich
Transcribe!
1 copy $39
2 - 4 copies $31
5 - 19 copies $25
20 - 99 copies $20
100 or more copies $15