After an initial private beta phase, we are happy to open the Auphonic automatic speech recognition integration to all of our users!

Our WebVTT-based audio player with search in speech recognition transcripts and exact speaker names.

We built a layer on top of multiple engines to offer affordable speech recognition in over 80 languages. This blog post also includes 3 complete examples in English and German.

Search within Audio and Video

One of the main problems of podcasts, audio and video is search.

Speech recognition is an important step to make audio searchable:
Although automatically generated ...

Podcasts are great, but they have a discovery problem – the technology to change that is available.
Today we release a private beta version of automatic speech recognition integrated in Auphonic.

UPDATE:
Please read our new and updated blog post Make Podcasts Searchable (Auphonic Speech To Text Public Beta) !

Automatic Speech Recognition in Auphonic

Since recently, most automatic speech recognition services were really expensive or the quality was very bad. Broadcasting corporations spent big money to generate automatic transcripts to search within audio.
That changed, there are a couple of affordable (even free) services available now, which can ...

Once in a while it is necessary to convert big audio or video archives to new formats and metadata conventions, other servers, new loudness targets or apply some audio processing/restoration algorithms.
Now we offer a managed processing of archives to companies and institutions, where we adapt our algorithms and workflows to special requirements of our clients, implement all steps (no need to program the Auphonic API yourself) and perform the whole process on dedicated hardware to speed-up the conversion.

National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory.

What we can offer

The last metadata format in this comparison series will be metadata for AAC audio files, which are usually included in an MP4 container (see MPEG-4 Part 14). MP4 audio files can have various file extensions, most commonly m4a, but also mp4 or m4b (for audio books).
So let the confusion continue ...

MP4, AAC and iTunes-style Metadata

The MPEG-4 container format is based on Apple's QuickTime container and each MPEG-4 file must have a major file brand. For example, an AAC audio file typically lists M4A as its major file brand. See AtomicParsley for a description of the ...

A new week - a new format: this weeks post is about metadata in Ogg Vorbis audio. The metadata container for these files is called Vorbis comment, which is also used in the FLAC, Theora and Speex file formats.
For a general introduction into audio metadata see e.g. the previous post in this comparison series: Part 2: MP3 Metadata (ID3 Tags).

The tool to analyze and create metadata for Ogg Vorbis files is called vorbiscomment.

About Vorbis Comment

Vorbis comment is a relatively simple metadata format specified by Xiph.org, similar to ID3 tags for MP3 ...

The second post of this comparison series is about metadata in MP3 files. Metadata allows information such as the title, artist, comments, cover image and other information about the audio to be stored in the file itself. MP3 files use ID3 tags and in the following I will compare common tags, image details and ID3 versions of various popular podcasts.
The analyzed files are the same as in Podcast Comparison, Part 1: File Formats and Bitrates.

Nice open source tools to analyze MP3 metadata are for instance eyeD3, soxi, mp3diags or EasyTag.

ID3 Versions and Used ...