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DESCRIPTION
Transcribe! is an assistant for people who sometimes want to work out a piece of music from a recording, in order to write it out, or play it themselves, or both.
The usual technique for doing this is to copy the music to cassette and then listen repeatedly to each bit, using your ear and your brain to work out what is happening. Unless you have perfect pitch then you also need a piano or a guitar handy to check out which note is which. However, if you copy the recording to your computer's hard disk as a sound file then you can use Transcribe! instead of the cassette machine and the piano. Transcribe! offers many features aimed at making the transcription job smoother and easier, including the ability to slow the music down without changing its pitch, and to analyse chords and show you what notes are present.
It is important to understand that Transcribe! does not attempt to do the whole job, processing an audio file and ouputting musical notation - this would be nice, but is a currently unsolved research problem. The spectrum analysis feature is very useful for working out those hard-to-hear chords, but you must still use your ear and brain to decide which of the peaks in the spectrum are notes being played, which are merely harmonics, and which are just the result of noise and broad-spectrum instruments such as drums. If you have never worked out even a simple piece of music by ear then Transcribe! will probably not help you (see How to Transcribe), but if you do sometimes work out recorded music by ear then Transcribe! can make the job a lot quicker and easier.
Transcribe! takes no interest in MIDI files - these already contain explicit information about what notes are to be played and when, and there are plenty of programs available which can display this information. Transcribe! deals with audio sample data files.
Transcribe! is not an editor. It reads, plays and records audio files but does not modify them.
WHAT'S NEW
Version 8.00: - It features a whole new layout and look, along with various improvements to sound file handling, some new commands, and various other improvements and bugfixes.
REQUIREMENTS
Mac OS X 10.3.4 or later.
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| Transcribe! User Reviews (4 posts) | Write A Review |
 | Feb 4 2009 |
DANIEL PAGE I am a guitar teacher, and Transcribe is the best software I have found to learn difficult songs. The key part of transcribe, which none of the reviewers have mentioned so far, is the ability to create song markers of 3 types: Section, Measure, and Beat. You do this by tapping the keyboard to the beat (although I don't use the beat markers, just the section and measure) while listening to the song one time through. You can then, using keyboard shortcuts, navigate to any section of the song, so that you can quickly move around. Slow-down software is no longer a big deal, Quicktime Player lets you slow down and change pitch for free, but have you ever tried to move to the guitar solo of a song in quicktime? Drag and drop the playhead, hit fastforward, then rewind, however you do it, it is going to take a lot of time. The marker system in transcribe lets me work easily twice as fast on transcribing, and probably faster. There are also controls for many different types of playing/pausing. For example, there is a button that will start playback for as long as it is held down, and when you pick it up, it will return to the marker that it started at (great for figuring out a particularly hard part). There are different controls for pausing, whether you want it to go back to the marker, or just pause in place. Also, you can navigate to the next beat, measure, or section marker using three different controls. It is, in fact, a dizzying variety of controls at first, but after using it to transcribe a song, you will be unable to go back and use anything else. Extremely well thought out design for transcription. The slow-down quality is quite good. Now, the one thing that people have complained about so far is the interface. It is, by modern mac standards, pretty harsh to look at. Doesn't have the textured, shaded feel that we come to expect, and uses some pretty funky old-school icons. This isn't a problem once you are up and running with the program, in fact, the whole point of the program is to be able to control the entire transcription process from the keyboard, but it is a pain when you are starting out learning the program. There is a great help file, and key commands, but none of them are presented in a modern mac-like way, it is all old school windows style. I rate the program at 5 stars, because the pros of the problem absolutely outweigh the cons, by far. Also, when contacting the developer, I have talked to a competent, thoughtful, human being, who was very receptive to my input for the program (and even to maybe revamping the interface in the future). Highly recommended program for musicians... in fact, I can't imagine being a musician these days and not having the program.
(Version 7.5) | |
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| Jul 12 2006 |
USERING Okay, so the interface isn't the best. But, I desperately needed something to help me transcribe stuff and after trying out a few different programs I found that this was the most user friendly. Most of all the sound quality is quite good. In fact, it's better than the others that I sampled. I congradulate the engineer who made Transcribe! happen for the Mac. To transcribe stuff is paramount to the jazz musician. I could care what the program looks like. As long as it is easy to use and does what I need in an efficient manner that's all that counts. As for the cost: you get updates for free! Let me repeat that: you get updates for free!!! Transcribe! Terrific!
(Version 7.31) | |
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| Jun 24 2005 |
ANONYMOUS There's a reason you're supposed to say "no" to drugs, because the only way I can imagine that anyone who made a Mac version of Transcribed would had to have been coked out of their mind. I thought that Amazing Slow Downer already had a clunky interface, but Transcribe's interface is just an abomination! It looks like it was ripped from a Windows 95 program, 16x16 pixel icons and all! Everything from the Help menu, the About screen, to the general interface shows a lack and blatant disregard for Mac-oriented design. If you are going to develop a Windows application, give it a Windows look-and-feel. But if you are going to make a Mac application, give it a Mac look-and-feel, not a Windows 95 look-and-feel. As if the general appearance was bad enough, it took me several minutes to even figure out how to slow down a song. I looked through all of the menus, but didn't find anything which signified a simple way to slow down (or speed up) a song. Not until I opened up the Effects window did I find a way to slow down the song. To add further insult AND injury, they are charging $45 for this? For my needs, this is about $35 too much. If you want to do yourself a favor, get someone to properly design the interface for the Mac, redo the icons, and lower the price of the program by a bunch. To Transcribe's credit, the audio was quite clear when I slowed the file down (and then sped it up). Also, this program is available for Windows, Macintosh, AND Linux. I will respect a developer who at least goes out of their way to develop a program for systems other than just Windows. Unless there are some unique features to this program that you NEED to have, I'd say pass on this program for now and look elsewhere.
(Version 7.2) | |
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 | Oct 22 2004 |
HERVé S. http://www.celemony.com/melodyne/ Too bad Melodyne is so costly -that's the kind of soft I'd buy just for the brilliance of it...
(Version 7.11) | |
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