Tuesday 17 August 2010

Dictating via iPhone and Mac?... Converting your .M4A audio files to .MP3

More and more people have iPhones and professionals are realising that they make great dictation devices too. You can easily dictate meeting notes as well as record telephone calls for later transcription. As you would expect, emailing files direct from your iPhone is a piece of cake and the sound quality is pretty good too. If you do record calls, remember that you have a legal obligation to inform the other person(s) that they are being recorded before you start.

If your dictation device uses the .M4A file format you may find that your Transcriber cannot type them using their software. For example, .M4A is not in the list of file extensions supported by the commonly used free Express Scribe software. However, your Transcriber can download a free file M4A converter program from www.nch.com.au, the producers of Express Scribe. This convert .M4A to .MP3 and other various formats.

If you are a Mac user, then its worth noting that an M4A file sent from your Mac may not open using a Windows PC, or cannot be converted using the above file converter software - when we've done this,
the file appears to get corrupted along the way somehow. If you need to convert the file, then you can do this simply by making a copy - your Mac will ask you in which format you would like the copy  - select .MP3 and it's automatically converted in the copying process. That's just typical of a Mac, so simple!

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