Ok. So I have to do transcriptions for the college that I am currently attending. I have to transcribe the audio of an .arf file to text. Needless to say this process is extremely time consuming and downright frustrating with the original .arf (Network Recording Player) player. The player offers no editing options, no shortcut options, no...anything really. Now, if the program just had the option of having configureable GLOBAL hotkeys (instead of the local spacebar pause/play button which doesn't work when the program is minimized) for basic functions such as play/pause, and progress/rewind of x amount of seconds I wouldn't care about the clunky interface or lack of conversion options and bugginess with the current conversion options.
So I thought I found a bulletproof solution that would make my life much easier. I converted all of my files (hundreds of hours of transcription work) to flash and took all of the voip files (the audio) and converted them to .mp3. This was after spending a lot of time attempting to convert to .wmv and .mpg and having the program fail miserably or produce shoddy results (as discussed on previous posts). I had no idea how to use flash files and didn't want to learn so I was a little hesitant to try, but when I did and it worked (voip audio file) it was as if the heavens opened. I would then convert the flash voip file to mp3 using a free program found online (forget what that was, but if anyone wants it you can contact me) that actually worked great. After the conversion I would use PotPlayer (amazing audio player) to set global hotkeys so that the "\" key was play/pause, the "[" and "]" keys were -5 seconds and +5 seconds respectively. It worked like a dream. All I had to do to stop the program and type the text was to move my pinky over. If I got a little behind I would just jump back 5 seconds. So I did many hours of transcription with my wife. All of the sudden one day my wife informs me that "there's a sentence missing in the converted file's audio." I checked, and sure enough, there was a chunk of audio missing, and the scary thing was it was a seemless gap, as if the audio never existed. At first I thought it was the freeware mp3 conversion and realized I was doomed; I knew of no audio player with hotkey support that would play .flv files. Turns out that PotPlayer even plays .flv files! I was happy again. I tried it with an original .flv file and.... the audio was still missing! Ahhhhhhhh.
So now I have to go back through hours of work, comparing the transcriptions to the original .arf files to make sure I didn't miss any audio.
I can't believe my university uses this software. I'm going to suggest they switch to something else because this is just ridiculous.
So why am I writing this? I guess for feature suggestions, but also to maybe get some hints as to how to convert these files in a reasonably quick amount of time with decent quality and NO AUDIO DROPS!
I'm using the software with x64 Windows 7 which is the standard now in Windows computing. If the response is going to be: "The conversion aspect of the Network Recording Player is not supported on 64 bit Windows 7 machines" I think this program should just be scrapped because it's stuck in the past.
