Audio Notetaker Offers a Better Way to Record Lectures
For many of us the only thing worse than listening to a 2 hour lecture is having to listen to it twice. This is essentially what happens when we try to record a class or presentation. If we were to be completely honest, the majority of us wouldn’t bother with listening to a lecture again. Why? Because fast forwarding and rewinding to find the “good stuff” requires entirely too much work. Audio Notetaker ($149) not only makes this process easier, it makes digital recordings more useful and relevant as well. Unlike other solutions which require pen and paper, Audio Notetaker is a software program which makes use of any digital recording you have on hand. It works with all commercial recorders (although it saves some exclusive features for Olympus recorders) and can import audio downloaded from the Internet.
Audio Notetaker is unique in that is presents the recording visually with speech represented by blocks and pauses represented by gaps. This lets the user easily see where the person is speaking and makes searching much easier.
The software has tons of features and I’ll just bullet point a few here before providing a link to a video overview made by the manufacturer.
The software lets you:
- Insert PowerPoint slides form the presentation next to its audio
- Type notes as you listen to the recording
- Highlight important parts of the recording to make them stand out
- Easily delete unnecessary segments of the recording
- Extract all of your highlighted audio into a new file
- Use the “index” feature of your digital recorder (Olympus only) to create automatic section breaks inside Audio Notetaker
All-in-all, this is a pretty fresh take on using digital recorders in the classroom. Here is a YouTube link to learn more.
