Free Voice File Player Downloads Compatible With All Foot Pedals

By Raj | Jun 15, 2009

Voice file player, the unavoidable integral part of medical transcription! How many choices do you have in that? Well, this week, I tried to do some research on the available freewares on the internet. In the early days of my transcription career when I started with CBay Systems, I was working with Medipro, a voice file player designed exclusively for CBay Systems (not available for public download). Out of CBay, I have also worked with the voice file players Trans-Aid and Trans-Assist for which I couldn’t find a reliable download source or any information on the internet. Currently, I’m using the paid version of Start Stop Universal Transcription System, available for $99, which is configurable with game port (15 pins), serial port (9 pins), USB, COM port, single pedal, dual pedal or three pedal assembly foot pedals. It can play audio file formats like .wav, .dss, .vox, .aud, gsm, mp3 etc., and it is fully configurable to automatically load the audio files on the player. While I’m perfectly satisfied with its performance and using it for the past six years for my home transcription purposes, I thought to do some research on the internet if there are any free audio file players available for transcription which can be used as an alternative for this paid version, and I could find a few of them. Here are they for your perusal:

Express Scribe

free medical transcription audio player, voice player

Express Scribe is the most popular free audio player software available on the internet for PC, Mac or Linux designed to assist the transcription of audio recordings. I think Express Scribe has almost all the functions available with that of Start Stop Universal Transcription System and can be used without any restrictions.

The features of Express Scribe include:

Variable speed playback.
Supports many professional foot pedals which connect to the game, serial or USB port to control playback.
Works with Microsoft Word and all major word-processor applications. Playback can be controlled with keyboard also when using other softwares like MS Word.
Automatically receives and loads files by internet (FTP), email or over a local computer network.
Automatically sends typing to the person who dictated the work.
Works with speech recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to automatically convert speech to text.
Loads audio directly – start to work as it loads in the background.
Can switch to ‘mini’ mode to reduce screen space.
Works on Windows 98, ME, XP 2000/2003/Vista/2008 and Windows 7 and Mac OS X – 10.1 or above and Linux
Ability to play almost all audio file formats (including encrypted dictation files) including wav, mp3, au, aif, vox, dct (encrypted dictation), Windows Media, VoiceIt (sri), RealAudio (ra and rm), Olympus, Lanier & Grundig (dss), Sony Recorder formats (msv, dvf), Philips Digital Recorder format, Sanyo Digital Recorder format, DSP TrueSpeech, mp2, etc.

If this is the free voice player that you have been looking for, go and grab it from ExpressScribe Download location.

F4 Transcriptions Software

F4 is a free transcription software which can be run from any computer, PC or Mac, Linux or Windows which can read audio files wma, ogg, wav, aif. However, it is compatible with single pedal footswitch only. Get more details and download link of F4 from audiotranskription.de

Update: The software author, Thorsten, has reported that F4 is compatible with three foot pedals. Please see the comment below.

Olympus DSS Player Lite

Olympus DSS Player Lite is capable of reading files DSS/WAV/WMA/VA. Find the download link and further information at Olympus DSS Player Lite information page.

And now a audio file player that works only with only mouse control….

Source Forge’s Transcriber

Transcriber allows you to play the audio file using mouse-activated controls that look like a cassette or CD player. You play a section, pause, then type what you have heard. Further, you can link the text to the audio file, i.e., when you highlight a line, the audio of the line plays audibly. I think it will be tedious to work on this; however, if your foot pedal is not working, you may try this player just for transcribing a couple of files until the foot pedal is fixed. Get further details and download link from Source Forge.

JoyScribe

Another good transcription audio player software that I have worked with is ESPI JoyScribe which comes bundled with some foot pedals for which I couldn’t find an authorized site available for download, either paid version or free. However, I was able to find a couple of unauthorized download links of Joy Scribe here and here,

Do you know any transcription voice player other than these?

6 Responses to “Free Voice File Player Downloads Compatible With All Foot Pedals”

Abishai on June 16th, 2009, at 4:48 pm said:

Your best post to date ! Very useful information you got here…Am sure everyone who bloghopped should consider themselves fortunate ! Awesome Job Raj !
Keep em coming.

Raj on June 16th, 2009, at 4:52 pm said:

Thank you. Definitely, encouragements/feedbacks like these help me come up with new ideas for blog posts.

Thanks again.

Thorsten on July 30th, 2009, at 7:28 am said:

Hello,
thanks for the review. F4 Software is also compatibel with the 3pedal footswitches that are sold with express scribe (VEC IN-USB1 and 2).
best regards
Thorsten

Cynthara on November 18th, 2009, at 12:51 am said:

Hi, Raj,

Thanks for all the information here. I’ve found your site extremely helpful as a newbie MT. I notice that you have experience with Medipro, which we use at my workplace. I’m wondering whether there is any way to control audio file playback with the keyboard. We use footpedals, but for some reason they don’t to work that well. At home, I find it very comfortable and fast to use my keyboard to control playback with other transcription programs, but so far I haven’t been able to discover whether Medipro can be controlled this way too.

Cynthara on November 18th, 2009, at 4:49 am said:

Thanks for the speedy response. I use both Express Scribe and F4 at at home with keyboard control. Once again, I appreciate all the work you have put into this site. It has been very helpful to me.

Raj on November 18th, 2009, at 3:28 am said:

To be frank, I have completely lost touch with Medipro since 2001. New versions might have come since then. So I think I won’t be the right person to guide you on this. Since Medipro is exclusively designed by C-Bay for their own use and not to be distributed other than C-Bay network, I think it you should be working for C-Bay only. So why don’t you ask your account head/supervisor about such an option?

Otherwise, Express Scribe, which I mentioned above, can be configured to be controlled by keyboard. Why not try that?