VLC on your phone for slowed-down transcription

MattHenry

In case this helps anybody study, I recently put VLC on my phone and provided you have a video (or even audio) file locally it has a slow down function at least as handy as Transcribe or Slow Downer for transcribing. Better still, you know how annoying it is to rewind or replay something with the transport controls on YouTube? With VLC your whole phone or tablet screen works as a scrub control so you can just drag your finger and rewind three or five seconds. Again, the one caveat is you have to have a video file locally.

VLC is free and open-source and available for Android and iOS: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

If you use it and like it consider donating $5. Open source software projects like VLC are great and a little support goes a long way.

Bones

Hey Matt. Do you know if you can loop a short segment?

thanks

MattHenry

No, you can't. One thing I've noticed is that when my screen dims the clip position backs up about two seconds when I wake my device up. This ends up working nicely to repeatedly hear a phrase until you're ready to move on... provided you stop it manually and work it out while the screen times out.

nomadgtr

FWIW the desktop version does have a loop function. Not sure why the mobile version doesn't have it yet but it works very well and is quite easy to use on the desktop version. I've used VLC for many years, great tool.

Bones

Nomad, can you just loop a short section or does it loop the whole song, thanks

nomadgtr

You set A and B points anywhere along the timeline and it loops between those two points. It could be as long or short as you need it to be.

Bones

Ok, thanks Nomad yes I see that now that you point it out. Pretty cool.

Nejc

Just dont use it on a WP.. Way to buggy. It freezes most of the time and the only way to fix that is to close the app and run it again.. Some time ago was trying to use it to break some of AD arpeggios and it was a pain.. The biggest minus is that you can slow down the video only to 0,5 speed and without the loop function i wasted more time to rewind the video than actually listening to those 2sec of the arpeggio.

Bones

Pardon my ignorance, what's a WP?

thanks

Nejc

I should pardon my laziness.. WP is windows phone

nomadgtr

Not surprising. I think they prioritize updates and features based upon how popular the app is on a given platform and the fact that the mobile versions are relatively new. You can always request features and fixes via their website.