I had heard about Pear Note before, but never realised it was more academic than just an app for notation. When I wrote about SoundPaper for iPad, I had no idea that a similar app existed on the Mac. Pardon my ignorance.
What is Pear Note? It’s an application that captures audio, text, and video, together as one stream, so you can transcribe the spoken word into readable text. The workflow follows such: Hit record, and start typing whatever you can. If you miss a sentence, ignore that and move on to the next one. The application will track your text entry to the time in the audio (or video) stream, so if you have a few blanks in your transcription, you can simply click that space, and the recorded audio will play back again.
You don’t even have to type anything. Just let the application record, and you can fill in later. You can even drag in an audio or video file, and then transcribe as you follow along. The latest version allows you to control the speed of playback. It’s even got a jump back 30 seconds feature, that can be triggered via a keyboard shortcut.
Pear Note 2.0 on the other hand brings some major new enhancements, mainly, a fantastic web sharing feature. You can take any Pear Notes project, and make a fairly functional web application out of it. Upload the files to a web server (or even Dropbox, as the app suggests), and they’re ready to be accessed by anyone. The viewer can control the playback position, and click on words to move the position back and forth. You can’t however edit the text itself, for which the viewer has to download the Pear Notes file. Kind of like iWork.com. I don’t know if there’s a real world use case for this feature, but it works rather well.
The other big ‘feature’, is a major UI enhancement. Pear Note looks much more refined — though not outstandingly beautiful — than its predecessor. Buttons are well arranged, sliders have gotten polish; the app doesn’t feel like a pet project in Xcode anymore.
Pear Note has a little more functionality up its sleeve. You can follow along a slideshow presentation — PPT, Keynote, or PDF — and it will sync that as well. You will need the presenter’s file, and switch the slides while the speaker is talking, but it’s a possibility.
The one thing Pear Note lacks, as does SoundPaper, is good outlining capability. UPDATE: I was a little hasty in my judgement. Turns out Pear Note does come with a ‘Quick List’ feature which allows you to do rudimentary outlines, perfect for the task. There is another issue, which I pointed out in SoundPaper as well. That is, if you’re writing a sentence from memory while the speaker has moved to the next, the marker mixes up the position. This leads to some confusion as to where you are in the audio file, though still far better than doing the whole thing manually. I suppose with a little practice, there won’t be much friction.
Where SoundPaper is more limited in its features, and is more proof of concept as of right now, Pear Note is ready for work. A lot of people are using this application for college and meetings, and I think if you’re the kind who carries your MacBook to your classroom, this is one kickass app to have. It’s $40 for a license, with a full featured 30-day trial you can take for a spin.
Now, if only Pear Note had a companion iPad app, and came with notable outlining capabilities, I’d wish I was back in college attending history lectures.
