July 22, 2008
Editing audio by editing text
Jon Udell talks about his interview of Dan Bricklin in which about Dan talks about his experience entering the world of audio. Jon says:
When I embarked on my personal audio adventure a few years ago, I naively thought that our fancy new digital technologies would make the whole process very simple. Boy, was I wrong about that.
As a coda, Jon uses the story of the production of of that very interview as an example of the routine complexities of audio.
Too true. I’m often tempted to record an interview but then I remember just what a pain in the butt it would be to edit it, even with my very low standards for audio quality.
So, is there something wrong with the idea of writing software that:
1. Converts spoken audio into text (presumably using existing tools)
2. Lets you use an editor to delete pieces of the text and move other pieces around, as you would with a low-end word processor
3. Uses the edited text to edit and output the audio
Even if Step 1 worked only moderately well, this application would turn editing spoken audio into a trivial task, no harder than (in fact, exactly the same as) editing a text file.
Does this software exist? Is there a good reason why it doesn’t, shouldn’t or couldn’t?
