I needed a cross-platform solution to use in my laptop (linux) and in my office pc (win xp) and decided to make my own:

It's called "Poor Man's Translator" and can be found here.

List of transcription programs

There is this comprehensive list of transcription software:

Name              Main category Second category Platform              License form

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anvil             Transcription                 Linux, Mac            Open Source

casualtranscriber Transcription                 Mac                   Freeware

EasyTranscript    Transcription                 Linux, Mac, Win       Open Source

ELAN              Transcription                 Linux, Mac, Win       Open Source

EXMARaLDA         Transcription                 Linux, Mac, Win       Open Source

Express Scribe    Transcription                 Mac                   Commercial

F4/F5             Transcription                 Mac, Win              Commercial

f4analyse         QDA           Transcription   Linux, Mac, Win       Commercial

Feldpartitur      Transcription QDA             Web                   Commercial

Folker            Transcription                 Win                   Free

HyperTranscribe   Transcription                 Mac                   Commercial

inqscribe         Transcription                 Mac, Win              Commercial

MEPA              QDA           Transcription   Win                   Freeware

Multitool         Transcription                 Mac, Win              Open Source

pmTrans           Transcription                 Linux, Mac, Win       Open Source

Praat             Transcription                 Linux, Mac, Unix, Win Open Source

Sonal             QDA           Transcription   Win                   Freeware

SoundScriber      Transcription                 Win                   Open Source

Transana          QDA           Transcription   Mac, Win              Commercial

Transcribe        Transcription                 Linux                 Open Source

TranscriberAG     Transcription                 Linux, Mac, Win       Open Source

Transcriva        Transcription                 Mac                   Commercial

trAVis            Transcription                 Web                   Free

xtrans            Transcription                 Linux, Win            Open Source

And another list on the German Ubuntu wiki with instructions on how to use Audacious and VLC with global hotkeys together with a text editor of your choice.

Personally I use smplayer (a graphical front-end for mplayer), where you can press a keyboard key to change the speed of playback, move back and forward easily in three different steps (default is 10 seconds, 1 minute and 10 minutes I think, which could be easily changed to e.g. 2 sec, 5 sec and 30 sec).

The player is cross-plattform and free software (GPL).

As editor I use vim with spellchecking.

Playitslowly

This nice and lightweight software aims at changing playback speed of recorded files but also has nice features useful for transcription. For more details and a screenshot see:

• Player to set short-keys for 1-second ahead/back jump?

Try TranscriberAG. It needs compiling and the process may not be easy, but you can try with this non official version or post a message to the project mailing list to get help.

As already mentioned, a second option is Evidence Bucket, with less features but very easy to start (it's written in Java). It can be used with an external word processor too, because it has global keyboard shortcuts.

A third option could be to install Wine and, if needed, PlayOnLinux and use the free versions of Windows software like Inqscribe, Express Scribe, etc.

Automatic voice recognition software normally reduces the manual transcription needs. But Automatic voice recognition technology is not still matured to produce accurate transcription for non-American accents, or with people speaking quickly or multiple speakers audio files. If you have more than one voice it is almost impossible to get a good transcript. Add to that any background noise or a weak recording and you can pretty much forget it.

So, after automatic transcription, you have to massage this transcription into the final form. Some of the massages are

Correct incorrectly transcribed words/phrases.
Correct punctuation/sentence breaks.
Define paragraph breaks.

For automatic transcription, you can refer

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

ExpressScribe is pretty good and the free version works fine. It's for Windows but works well in Wine.

http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/

After getting frustrated with all the Linux community had to offer, in the way of transcription, I went on the path to copy Express Scribe. This is self-promotional, so if you like my software, I did it :). My program runs in the background. It's a simple window displaying "Hello World", but it operates like Express Scribe in that it listens for key combinations from you and controls your audio accordingly. You're free to use whatever document program you desire.

Controls:

F2 is play/pause.
F4 is rewind 3 seconds.

I may advance the program further, if there is enough outcry but at this time, I have no need to do so.

You will need to install Python3 and Pyglet (minimum). If you want to deal with encrypted and compressed formats, you need to install Avbin.

The project can be found here: https://github.com/ki4jgt/Transkripshun

Try Parlatype, rewind on pause and much more

http://gkarsay.github.io/parlatype/

I tried many of the above suggestions and ended up with audacity

Use it like this to manually annotate a audio file with text:

1. Open your audio file


2. Hit (p) to pause track when you hear something you like to annotate with text


3. Hit Ctrl+m to add annotation at point and enter annotation text


4. Hit enter to finalize text annotation


5. Hit (p) to continue listening to track


6. Repeat 2-5 until your audio file is annotated

Make sure Sync-Lock-Tracks is enabeled.

Jump between annotations with Alt+left / right arrow