Crosswrite

I’ve spent some time transcribing audio in the past (both Mormon Artist interviews and family history recordings) and it’s nice having keyboard shortcuts to control audio playback. There are some nice desktop apps that do this for you, but last night I realized that with the HTML5 audio element and some Javascript magic, it’d be super easy to code up a web app to do it instead. And it was. It’s called Crosswrite, and you can try it out on the demo page.

Notes

It works pretty well in Chrome and Safari, but it doesn’t work in Firefox. This is just a demo, not a full-blown app. All things considered, however, it only took ten or fifteen minutes to write, and the hardest part by far was deciding what keyboard shortcuts should do what. (I’m still not entirely happy with my choices.)