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

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

It's always my first thought when it comes to dogs and VR software. anisoptera's bouvier (massive sheepdog-like thing) Levi once came up behind either her or 98 and barked while she was typing, and Dragon said that Levi said, "Honolulu!"

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

That's, um... yeah. I guess I could imagine the kind of bark that sounds like the vowels of "Honolulu".

[anisoptera.livejournal.com]

It was a fairly normal bark...a booming sort of woof woof like you get from a big dog. It did not sound like "Honolulu" at all to me but it kept showing up on the screen. I was talking away and then "Honolulu" would show up. It was very confusing as Levi was not even in the same room with me. I almost peed myself laughing when I finally figured it out.