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

[therobbergirl.livejournal.com]

I did a search on Office Depot and they want a lot of money (~$240) for the transcriber unit. (Search for "transcriber" rather than "dictaphone" -- distaphone gets you the recording part of the device.) My Ebay search turned up a ton of items priced ludicrously high and unbelievably low.

As to getting up to speed, they're very easy to learn. I was comfortable with it inside of five minutes.

I wonder if there's some sort of place that deals in old, crunchy office supplies. You don't need a modern, shiny one. An old clunky heavy thing from the 1980s or even earlier would do the trick.

Do watch out for cassette size. Most of the ones I see on Ebay and Office Depot are for micro cassette. I don't know if that's what you have.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I too did a quick web search and found new units were pricey. O'course, if it cuts transcription time in half, that's like paying $240 to have half of it done, which is a bargain. Still worth looking for a used one, though.