I spend a lot of time transcribing audio, for various reasons. When doing interviews, I usually carry around a portable recorder. That had long been a tape recorder, but lately I’ve been going digital — it tends to cause less problems. Roland’s Edirol R-1 serves perfectly, and I’ve had terrific battery life, no hassles, and fantastic audio quality using its built-in mics, even in some horrible audio environments. While I haven’t done this myself, I know many jazzers spend endless hours transcribing solos. There are also plenty of times when you end up transcribing yourself, playing or humming a spur-of-the-moment musical idea. Often times, I find (especially when composing in a classical idiom) that I have to pay really close attention to musical details, lest I round off part of what made them interesting in the first place.

All of these create the same problem: unlike tape, digital is touch to speed up or slow down. There are various specialty tools for transcription. The Mac-only Transcriva, which I bought and used for a time, is even designed specifically for transcribing text from audio.

Somehow, though, I found all these tools to be overkill. I wanted something dead-simple, lightweight, and always available. And I wanted to easily pop into other tools, like Sibelius for notation (or a pen and paper, for that matter), or apps like TextMate or NeoOffice for words.

Then I happened to dig around in Apple’s QuickTime Player.