You can read about Transcribe! automation in Help - Various Topics. In order to make your life a little easier, here we provide some example scripts which you can download. This should help in two ways : first, it may save you some typing. And second, it saves you from having to figure out how to create a text file with the correct extension (xscscpt). Instructions for how to create such files are in the Help, but if you download these examples then they will be correct already, so if you create your own scripts by editing one of these files and then saving it, it should still be correct.
Once you have downloaded these and extracted them from the zip, and launched Transcribe!, you can run the script either by double clicking it or by drag-n-drop onto the Transcribe! window.
Note: some of these scripts use commands which are new in version 8, so make sure you are using the current Transcribe! release before trying them.
Some of these scripts operate on the currently loaded transcription, so will fail if there isn't one (e.g. accelerate1.xscscpt starts by turning off looping and setting the speed to 50%, which will fail if there is no sound file loaded). Others start by loading named transcription or sound files : these you will need to edit before you can use them, to provide the correct name of a file on your system which you want to load.
We provide these script examples in different versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. The only difference is the line-ends, which are represented differently on the three systems.
To edit script files, it's best to use an editor which will understand and preserve the UTF-8 character set used. If your script uses transcription files or sound files whose names include accented or other "international" characters then UTF-8 is essential or it simply won't work.
This sets a specific selection and loops it for 30 seconds, then sets the selection from a previously stored loop and plays that for 30 seconds. It also shows the use of ScriptMessage to suspend a script until you are ready to continue it.
We assume you have selected the section you want to loop before using this script. This script will then play the loop through twice in each of all 12 keys.
This assumes that you have created some loops on the Misc page of the Fx window and you want to practice each in turn, with speed up.
This is a script which will set the speed to 50% and play the currect selection twice, then increase speed by 5% and play it twice more, and so on until it reaches 100%. If you look inside the script you will see that the instructions are explicitly listed and you can reprogram it as you wish by changing them.
This is a script which will play the current selection twice, then increase speed by 1% and play it twice more, and so on for ever.
This one loads a file, plays a bit, then loads another file and plays a bit of that. You will need to edit this to give it appropriate filenames, before you can use it.
This is a script which will place section markers every minute throughout the track (up to 100 mins). I find this useful if I want to burn a lengthy speech track to CD. The "Export Split Sound File" command will then divide it into minute-long tracks and then you burn them to CD with no gaps between the tracks. This is much more convenient than having a single 70 minute track on the CD.
This sets the various Audio Effects to specific values.
This loads a file, changes speed & pitch, and exports it. You will need to edit this to give it appropriate filenames, before you can use it.
We use "+" (our "escape character") to insert various special characters into text. This shows the various escapes and displays their values in a message.
Loops can indeed also store Fx settings. Here we show how to load a collection of settings of your choice into any transcription.
This is something quite different. Suppose you have a folder full of mp3 files and you want a script that will process all of them in some way. Because Transcribe! scripts are not a true programming language, you cannot write a loop to do this in a Transcribe! script. But what you can do is write a program in some other language which will generate a Transcribe! script to do the job. On Windows you can do it with a command file that runs in a console, and I have written an example which does this. It's messy because Windows command file syntax is horrible, but it works, and the file contains further info about how to use it.
Click here to download slowlist.zip for Windows.
On Mac or Linux you could use a script in the terminal and here is an example of this technique kindly contributed by Mike Bonnice. He comments that it is not guaranteed to be bug free and should be seen as a framework for ideas and improvement.
Click here to download changespeed.sh for Linux or Mac.