LJ Brain Trust: Transcription?

[cjsmith]

I have a bunch of cassette tapes of people talking and would love to have them transcribed. Formal services will do this for an enormous fee, but I'm not sure I need that kind of quality. I'm not exactly going to publish the results. I just want them searchable with "grep".

Starving students would probably do it for $10/hr, but even that gets kind of stiff. With the amount of time the transcriber would have to stop the tape and catch up on typing, even assuming everything's perfectly audible the first time through, I can't imagine a 60-minute tape taking any less than two hours... and I think I have something like a hundred of these.

Ideas for doing this cheaply and quickly? Or should I abandon the whole project if it's not worth $2K to me?

[edit: I counted, I have seventy tapes. Each has a bit less than 60 minutes of talk on it. I've transcribed two and each one of those took me many hours, my vague memory says four or five. I can imagine that someone skilled or less perfectionist might get that down to something closer to two.]

Comments

[ericainohio.livejournal.com]

I think what she was talking about was a 'transcription machine'. I am actually a trained transcriptionist, although I've never sought a job in that field! These machines are basically cassette players, and it has a foot pedal that you attach to the machine that starts and stops the playback. And when you lift your foot, the recording stops and actually goes backward a tick or two (on most machines, you get to adjust how long a 'tick' is, lol). So that when you start again, you're typing from where you left off. You can wear headphones to make listening to the machine easier too. There would be a jack for that.

I'm not sure how much these machines cost. I'll bet a quick google search would tell you. Or you could check ebay for a used machine?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I get it now. (amywithani's comment also described this.) Worth a thought, since it keeps the hands free and could really cut down on the time...

[dizzdvl.livejournal.com]

I was a transcription clerk for doctors and we used Dictaphone.