I record my college lectures using QuickTime Pro, and then I transcribe them later in Pages. However, I can’t type as quickly as the audio plays, and it’s difficult to keep switching back and forth between Pages and QuickTime Pro to pause the playback or quickly rewind a few seconds. Is there an easier way?

We’ve tried several Mac applications designed to help you with your transcription work. Our favorite, Listen&Type X3.2 ($20, www.nattaworks.com), lets you control the playback of any audio or video file without leaving your text editor. A partially transparent controller window floats above all the other windows on your screen, and you can navigate the media file with your mouse.

Listen&Type X's floating control window lets you control playback with keyboard shortcuts.

But your fingers don’t have to leave the keyboard at all. Listen&Type X lets you create keyboard shortcuts to pause or resume playback, jump 5 seconds forward or back, and add markers to your media file, which you can then jump to directly. WMA and WMV files are supported, as long as you have installed Windows Media Components for QuickTime (free, www.flip4mac.com). Basically, if you can open a file in QuickTime Player, you can open it in Listen&Type.

OmniOutliner Professional ($69.95; www.omnigroup.com; see our review here) is an organizational note-taking app that lets you import, record, and embed multiple audio recordings directly into your document, and you can type while you’re recording. Later on, you can play back your audio from within your document and continue typing notes. Just like Listen&Type X, OmniOutliner will open any file that will open in QuickTime Player.

OmniOutliner Professional lets you embed multiple audio recordings into your notes.

Pear Note ($39.99, www.usefulfruit.com) combines note-taking and audio/video recording and even links them together. As you listen to or watch your media file, Pear Note remembers which characters you were typing at that exact moment in time and will highlight those characters for you.
 
It works in the opposite direction too. When you switch to Pear Note’s Navigate mode, you can click on different parts of your text document, and the app automatically jumps to that moment in your media file. However, as of press time, Pear Note can currently only support one media file per document and doesn’t work with WMA files, which is the default format for many digital handheld audio recorders.

Pear Note Highlights the part of your document that you were typing at that point in time in your media file, and lets you jump to a section of your media file by clicking on your text.