Transcribe! Help : Edit menu commands

The Edit menu offers the usual commands for copying & pasting text in text entry fields. Too exiting for words, really.

Preferences

This command displays a dialog allowing you to alter some global aspects of Transcribe!'s behaviour.

This affects the display of the waveform profile : when you adjust playback volume with the slider at the left of the profile, should the graphic of the profile itself be scaled too? This is purely cosmetic, according to taste.

When looping playback is on, you can choose to have a pause after each time the segment is played before it starts to play again. This gives you a bit of time to think and to write down what you hear.

Min: 0 Max: 10 Default: 0 (seconds).

When Transcribe! has prepared some audio to be played it puts it in the playback buffer and hands it to the sound driver to be queued for playing. If the buffer is too short then you may get playback glitches - short slivers of silence. If the buffer is long then Transcribe!'s response to such things as volume and pitch changes gets slow, as these changes can only take effect after the present buffer contents have been played.

Min: 2 Max: 20 Default: 3 (tenths of a second).

Sometimes, heavy computation is required to obtain audio data from the Sound file ready for playback. This is particularly true when decoding MP3 files and when you use slowed-down playback. Transcribe! buffers the audio source data, and you can choose the buffer size in seconds. On a faster machine a short buffer will provide a faster response, while on a slow machine you may want a longer buffer so as to get longer stretches of uninterrupted playback. If Transcribe! is unable to keep up then a dialog appears from time to time saying "Pre-computing audio data", while the buffer is refilled. The buffer length applies to the duration after any slowing down has been applied.

You can always avoid this problem by using the Copy to File or Slowdown to File commands.

Min: 0 Max: 10 Default: 4 (seconds).

This button brings up the Adjust Timbre dialog which allows you to adjust the timbre of the sound generated by Transcribe! when you mouse-button the keyboard graphic.

This dialog allows you to change the timbre (the tonal quality) of notes generated by Transcribe! when you mouse-button the keyboard, and also of reference notes used for tuning comparison. This is a global option.

The point is that the timbre of a note can sometimes affect your ability to hear its pitch clearly, so adjust it according to your taste.

A choice of triangle or square wave is offered. The slider adjusts the symmetry of the wave : "mild" gives a symmetrical wave while "savage" is very asymmetrical and thus has more harmonics.

Transcribe! Help is supplied as HTML files, like those used on the Internet. Therefore you need a web browser (Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator/Navigator or similar) to read them, even though you aren't actually using the Internet - web browsers can also be used to browse HTML files locally on your hard disk. If you don't have a web browser you must get one : these days they are usually given away, and are pre-installed on new machines.
Once you have a browser running you can use its "Open" command to open the file "contents.html" in the Transcribe! "Help" folder, and then you can browse Transcribe! help in the usual way. When you launch a browser ("Browse the Internet" command, Apple Menu) it can happen that the browser immediately dials out, which is a pain if you want to use it for local browsing. This usually happens because the browser has been configured to go automatically to a "home page" or "startup page" which is non-local, so the answer is to configure it ("Preferences") to use no startup page, or to use one which is on your machine.
Transcribe! also has the "Transcribe! Help" menu command and "Help" buttons in many dialogs : in order for these to work Transcribe! has to be able to find your web browser and this can sometimes go wrong. If the Help menu and the Help buttons in dialogs don't work or if they use the wrong browser then you should use the Preferences command (Edit Menu) to select the appropriate browser to use.
It is also possible for Transcribe! to be unable to load the browser due to shortage of memory (it will tell you so). In this case you can try closing other applications before launching Transcribe!, or reduce Transcribe!'s memory (click on the Transcribe! program icon, then select "Get Info" - "Memory" on Finder's "File" menu) or you could try launching your browser before launching Transcribe!, so it's already runnning, or you could get some more memory.
Remember though that you can always access the Help files by starting the browser up yourself, as described above.

Label piano keys if wider than . . .

Transcribe! always labels the C's on the piano keyboard, giving their MIDI octave numbers for reference. If you want then you can also have note names appear on all the white notes. If you specify 0 here (the default) then Transcribe! will only label the C's. Otherwise, Transcribe! will label all the white notes whenever their size on the screen is wider than the number of pixels you specify. About 20 or 30 is usually a suitable sort of value.

In new windows . . .

Here you can specify your preferences for the initial state of new transcription windows when they are first opened. You can choose whether the piano and/or spectrum should be displayed, and whether auto-scroll and loop should be enabled.
The "Set size and keyboard position from current window" button is only enabled if you currently have a transcription open. It records the size and position of the transcription window and also the position of the piano keyboard (if you have scrolled the keyboard position, which notes appear at the top and bottom). Subsequently when you launch Transcribe! the first transcription you open will appear in this size and position, and subsequent ones will have the same size, with their positions cascaded in the usual way. Also when you open a transcription the initial piano keyboard position will be set from what was recorded.

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