The FTW Transcriber’s E1 and E2 buttons (on versions 4.5 and higher) offer two levels of audio enhancement. Click on one of the buttons to turn on audio enhancement, and click on it again to turn audio enhancement off.
If you do not see the E1 and E2 buttons on the FTW Transcriber’s interface, download and install the latest version. During installation, accept ALL the codecs and packages that are offered.
If when clicking on the E1 and E2 buttons you see the error message “Error: Could not open or create the target config.txt for writing.“, this is a permissions issue. Close the FTW Transcriber, then right-click on the program icon and click Run As Administrator, and this should remove the issue. You will need to open the software in that way every time, unless you automate it. Google “How to always run a program as administrator”.
If clicking E1 and E2 makes no difference to your audio, the three possible causes are:
- E1 and E2 are working but there is no audible difference because your audio is already as clear as the FTW Transcriber can make it. Try clicking the “E” buttons while playing one of the low-quality YouTube videos at the foot of this page, and you should hear a noticeable difference.
- You did not install the FTW Transcriber fully and correctly. Go to the Download page of this web site, download the FTW Transcriber again and reinstall it, taking care to accept ALL the codecs and packages that are offered during the installation process.
- Your Windows user does not have sufficient administrator rights on your computer. Overcome this by always running the FTW Transcriber as an administrator. To do that, right-click on the program icon then click Run As Administrator.
Read this entire page to fully understand what the FTW Transcriber’s audio enhancement can and cannot do, and then test it with the audio samples below.
E1 offers a moderate noise filter with little or no loss of voice quality.
E2 offers a stronger noise filter with possible minor loss of voice quality.
The FTW Transcriber’s audio enhancement feature removes or reduces the volume of sounds that are above and below the frequencies of the human voice. For example, cassette hiss is higher than the human voice so the audio enhancement feature will be effective at reducing it. Background voices are obviously at the same frequency as the human voice, so audio enhancement will NOT be effective at reducing them.
The audio enhancement feature cannot work miracles. It cannot make a muffled recording clear; it cannot make a recording less echoey; it cannot improve a speaker’s voice. All it can do is filter out background noise that is above or below the frequency of the human voice. If your recording consists just of a speaker and no background noise, audio enhancement will make no difference to it.
Background noise is stressful to listen to, so by reducing it you can lower the amount of effort and strain involved in transcribing.
Audio enhancement will make less difference to recordings downloaded via our transcription workflow software ScribeManager, because ScribeManager already optimizes them.
Audio enhancement works not just on recordings within the FTW Transcriber but across your computer’s entire sound output. If you close the FTW Transcriber, that does NOT turn audio enhancement off. Therefore when you have finished transcribing you may want to turn audio enhancement off on the FTW Transcriber’s interface. Audio enhancement will in any case be turned off automatically when you restart Windows. When you open the FTW Transcriber, it will remember your last audio enhancement setting.
As mentioned above, both E1 and E2 remove high and low background noise but may involve a minor loss of voice quality, especially E2. If you do not notice or mind that loss, you could leave audio enhancement on by default while transcribing, perhaps by using E1 for most recordings and E2 for recordings with especially high background noise. However, all recordings are different and with some sound files you may find it better to turn audio enhancement off.
To test audio enhancement, play the videos below and repeatedly press E1 and E2 on the FTW Transcriber’s interface to hear the difference that audio enhancement makes.
Note that all the sound samples below consist of continuous noise, as this makes it easier to hear the effect that audio enhancement has. However, it can also reduce the volume of “one-off” noises such as microphone bumps, footsteps, objects being dropped, door slams, chairs scraping on a floor, cutlery and utensil noises, paper rustling, mouse clicks, bird noises, various types of mechanical noise, and many others.
Wind noise