Transcribe old recordings: cassettes and oral histories

Step one: make the tape a file

This site transcribes files, not tapes. A cassette needs to be played into a computer and recorded as an audio file. The usual ways are a cassette player with a USB connection, or an ordinary player with a line output connected to the computer's line input or a USB audio adapter. Free audio editors such as Audacity can record that input and save it as WAV or MP3. Record each side as its own file, and keep the WAV as your archive copy: a transcript can always be made again, a tape cannot be re-recorded.

Step two: upload and read

1. Choose the digitised file in the box above. WAV, MP3 and M4A all work, and the formats page lists the rest.
2. Set the spoken language if the speakers are not using English. Dialects and old-fashioned vocabulary are where a transcript struggles most, so leave extra time to check.
3. Listen while you read. Correct names, places and dates first: they are what a family or an archive will search for.
4. Export text for reading, or timestamped text to keep each passage tied to its place on the tape.

What old recordings do to a transcript

• ·Tape hiss and a quiet voice: raising the volume in an editor before you upload can help a little.
• ·Wow and flutter, where the tape speed wobbles, makes voices sound unsteady; it limits accuracy and is not something a transcript can fix.
• ·A microphone far from the speaker, a room with echo, a television or a kettle in the background.
• ·Two or more people at once, which is normal in a family interview and hard for any transcript.
• ·Dialect, an accent the language model rarely sees, and words that have fallen out of use.

Oral-history practice: permission and records

An interview is the speaker's story, and projects that collect them usually get written permission for how the recording and the text may be used. Keep the signed form with the file. Uploading a recording sends it to our server, so use it only for material you may share that way; the privacy page says how long files are kept, and the self-hosted option is for recordings that must stay on your own machine. Treat the transcript as a working draft: if the project publishes it, the speaker or a person who knew them should review it.

Long tapes

Without an account one file can be up to 15 minutes and 25 MB. A free account lifts those per-file limits and keeps your transcripts in a library, so for a longer recording create one instead of cutting the file up. A C-90 cassette is 45 minutes a side, so a free account is the practical route, or you can record each side in two or three files.