Audio Hijack Pro Tip: Time shift for faster transcribing in real time
Hey journalists, Audio Hijack allows us to record live-streamed events (read: press conferences) for more accurate note-taking and later reference. But often we need to get that story up right away, so even uploading the audio file and waiting for an auto-transcription service to finish can take too long. So how do you get what you need from that press conference in real time?
Enter the “time shift” block. Add this little widget to your session, and you can jump backward and forward in time without interrupting your live recording. There are even global keyboard shortcuts so that you can make this happen while transcribing in another app.
This quick how-to guide assumes you already know how to set up and record sessions using Audio Hijack. If not, there’s a “Quick Tour” and help manual within the app, a quick overview video here, and more advanced info on the kinds of things you can record here. There’s also a guide on recording Skype or other VoIP calls, but that’s for another day.
Here are the steps:
1. Add the “Time Shift” block to your existing session. I still don’t know if there’s a best practice on placement of this block, but I can confirm it works if you slot it between the Recorder and Output Device blocks.
2. Click on the time shift block to see the controls. You can use your mouse or trackpad to time shift this way.
3. Finally, set your global hotkeys so you can bounce back and forth in the timeline without interrupting the recording and while typing in another app. You’ll see the hotkeys I’ve chosen in the screenshot below, but you can set them to anything you like.
