I’m trying to do a very lengthy transcription (over 200 hrs. of interviews), and I’ve been quite successful with typing on my laptop (libreoffice) while playing the audio on a netbook running Audacity. I need to use Audacity’s features, as the audio recording is very poor quality (lots of background noise), and the 99 year old speaker is talking in English which is her fifth language (heavy accent, difficult syntax). Generally it’s going better than expected, however I find it very hard to stay focused when I have to constantly take one hand off of the laptop keyboard just to use the spacebar on the netbook to pause and then restart the audio playback.
Of course I’d be thrilled to have a foot pedal with multiple programmable buttons that I could set up on openSUSE to control various functions in Audacity, but if that weren’t possible a simple foot pedal with a single button that would simulate the space bar would be enough to make the job much, much easier.
I’ve found a number of USB foot pedals on-line, but all the documentation mentions included driver disks with drivers for Windows and Mac only.
On 03/25/2013 07:46 PM, caprus wrote:
> Any thoughts?
you could put an old, full size keyboard on the floor with a (say)
fat wooden pencil, glued/taped/stuck to the top of the space
bar…and learn how to tap just the space bar with your foot…
or, you could pry off the cap for all the other keys so only the
space bar were available…
the keyboard could be either USB or earlier with an adapter…most
recycle shops have a pile of old keyboards for very little cost…