Transcribe! 7.30 review

Transcribe! project is an assistant for people who sometimes want to work out a piece of music from a recording, in order to write it

License: Shareware File size: 2657K Developer: Seventh String Software

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Transcribe! project 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 down music 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 outputting 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! plays and records audio files but it is not an audio editor. It is capable of applying various effects to audio such as speed change, pitch change and EQ. You can save the modified audio to a new sound file if you want.

Here are some key features of "Transcribe":
Depending on version, Transcribe! reads audio from many different types of audio file and audio CD. It also has a "Record" facility for recording from analog sources such as cassette or vinyl. It displays the audio waveform and allows you to scroll around, place markers for sections, measures and beats, and easily play or loop from any point.
Loops and positions can be stored and recalled. There are many keyboard shortcuts and you can configure these as you like (in version 7). You can configure Transcribe! to respond to pedals of various types so as to keep your hands free : start and stop playback with your feet!
There is extensive and readable help accessible from within the program.
The "spectrum" feature displays the strength of the various pitches in any chord or note you select, in the form of a graph - a wavy line over a piano keyboard graphic. The height of the various peaks in the graph indicate the strength of the note above which the peak appears. This is not a magic bullet for analysing chords but it can be a very useful source of information.
Transcribe! offers various audio processing effects (Slowdown, Pitch Change, EQ filtering etc) intended to help with transcribing. These effects all run in "real time" unless your machine is old & slow. This means there is no pre-processing or other waiting, the processing is performed on-the-fly while playing and you can instantly hear the effect of changes to EQ etc. For instance if you press the half-speed button while playing then playback simply continues, at half speed.

Mono/Karaoke

This effect allows you to mix the two channels of a stereo recording together in various ways including phase-reverse, commonly known as "karaoke" as it sometimes has the effect of removing the vocal (if the vocal is panned dead-centre).

EQ

A powerful EQ filter.

Tuning

Adjustment to playback pitch, in cents (hundredths of a semitone) for fine tuning and also larger shifts of up to two octaves, which can for instance be useful in hearing low, murky bass parts by raising them by an octave or two.

Transposition

Special handling for those of you who play a transposing instrument such as trumpet or saxophone.

Speed

Speed variable from one twentieth to double speed.
Click here for an MP3 file (373 KB) demonstrating the sound quality of slowdown-without-pitch-change. It contains 7 seconds of a guitar solo played quite fast, followed by the same at half speed. This is what you get when you press Transcribe!'s half-speed button (version 7.20). I haven't bothered to give lots of samples, since you can download Transcribe! for a free trial period and try it yourself.

Flyer

Sometimes people ask me for a printed information sheet about Transcribe!. I don't distribute printed materials but here is a single-sided information sheet as a pdf (Adobe Acrobat) file which you are welcome to download and print out.