[PLUG] Sound quality driving me to the dark side

[Dick Steffens]

Readers with unfortunately good memories will recall that I use an old 
program called Transcribe along with a separate old program called 
Footpedal to play back audio recordings for the purpose of transcribing 
them. Some of you may also recall that I've been fooling around, from 
time to time, with updating those programs to run well on Ubuntu 12. 
When I switched to Ubuntu 14 they wouldn't work at all. A few months ago 
I realized that those programs work well on Ubuntu 10, so I created a 
VirtualBox Ubuntu 10 machine just for the purpose of running them. This 
solution has worked well, for the most part.

Yesterday I ran into a problem that tells me that explains why I haven't 
been able to dedicate the time to those programming projects. Some of 
the audio files I get are plagued by distortion. I commented about a 
particularly noisy file to the fellow I get the work from. He listened 
to it on his end and said that it was clean. This made me wonder if the 
problem was on my end. I listened to the file with Audacity and 
discovered that the noise was considerably reduced -- not completely 
gone, but much better than when played on Transcribe.

I had been planning on re-writing Transcribe so that it would run on 
Ubuntu 14, but since I would be using the same library calls as the old 
version I wouldn't be getting rid of the noise. Transcribe -- and Totem 
Movie Player (which seems to go by a different name as Ubuntu releases 
progress) -- both use gstreamer for playing audio. So, when I listen to 
a file with either tool it sounds the same. Being in a hurry to meet a 
deadline I borrowed my wife's Win7 laptop, installed a demo copy of 
GearPlayer 4, and got the work out.

As I mentioned above, the noise was reduced with Audacity, so they must 
use different libraries for reproducing sound than gstreamer. Audacity 
was good enough that, if I could figure out a way to control it with a 
foot pedal, I'd consider using it. However, that's not what Audacity is 
designed for, and it's not all that clear that there is a way to insert 
the foot pedal into its controls.

Now for the part related to the dark side. From my experience using 
GearPlayer yesterday and again today, I've concluded that I need to 
spend the money for it. However I'd rather not have to run two machines. 
(I've done this before, and will probably continue to do it for the time 
being, but I'd rather just run the one machine.) My current desktop has 
the resources to support virtual machines, so I'm considering setting up 
a Win7 virtual machine just to run GearPlayer. Does anyone have 
experience setting up VirtualBox with Win7? Are there any gotchas I need 
to worry about before going out and getting a legal copy of Win7?

Thanks for understanding my unfortunate need to proceed to the dark side.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens