Impatient Idealist

When I was a lowly student, I had to transcribe taped interviews for someone else's thesis. These interviews averaged 60 minutes each. It took me about four hours for the first few and after that, I could do it in about two. It helps a lot if your transcriber uses a dictaphone (no, use your finger like everyone else, ha ha ha). With a dictaphone, you put a pedal on the floor, press it with your foot to move the tape forward, and release the pedal to pause and rewind a little bit. You can customize how far to rewind. To rewind extra, you just tap the pedal a few quick times. For example, I had set mine to four second rewind. If I quickly pressed and released three times, it would rewind about 12 seconds. That was amazingly useful and speeded up transcription time immensely.